On 23 Jun 2009, at 21:12, mike clemow wrote:
I am really thinking about the usability of the interface for musical purposes. The Reactable TUI is a little like the Theremin, which is nice for making cool sounds with, but really hard for playing actual music (not intending a discussion about "what is music").
It's just an interface technology--not an application. You can place the fiducials on objects and the software will determine position and orientation of the object on the table. It also attempts to give you primitive touch (i.e. finger-finding) information. Now, what you DO with this technology--in other words: your particular application--can be judged as musical/non-musical or a good/bad application of the technology. So, if you design a theremin using the Reactables technology, then you'll have a table-top theremin. If you design a composition tool, then you'll be looking at it in a completely different light.
Yes, but what I mean is that the whole TUI interface might be a like Theremin human interface. So I'm a bit skeptical about it. It has some cool ideas though in how to use that interface - how to connect components and make them visual. But that could possibly be done with HIDs, that then might be better at fine control suitable in music.
I think that this conversation was really about ChucK's OSC implementation, which is not fully complete if you read the OSC spec. I'm unsure, however, where stuff like this falls in the priority list of the dev'rs.
Yes, it might still be cool to have that to experiment with. Hans