Interactive Objects

What is Arduino?

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

Reactable (Tangible Music Interface)

Reactable

About the instrument

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several musicians share the control of the instrument by moving and caressing objects on a luminous table, allowing them to create complex and dynamic sonic topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The reactable hardware is based on a translucent, round multi-touch surface. A camera situated beneath the table, continuously analyzes the surface, tracking the player's finger tips and the nature, position and orientation of physical objects that are distributed on its surface. These objects represent the components of a classic modular synthesizer, the players interact by moving these objects, changing their distance, orientation and the relation to each other. These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.

TENORI-ON (Tangible Music Interface)

* Push the start button and see it.