Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) allow interaction with digital content through physical artifacts, enabling a smooth bridge between the digital and the physical worlds. In an entertainment context, such interfaces offer rich expressive capabilities for experimental works. This paper introduces Tangible Beats: a user interface that, in a collaborative fashion, enables the creation of musical beats by manipulating colored tokens on a flat surface. A prototype implementation, composed of a Kinect camera, a video projector, speakers and a laptop is presented. The Kinect is used to estimate the position of the tokens and the projector provides visual feedback to help inexpert music makers compose their own beats by changing the notes and the instruments.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Sousa:2014,
author = {Alexandre M. F. de Sousa and Carlos H. Morimoto},
booktitle = {XIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Jogos e Entretenimento Digital (SBGames) - Trilha de Arte & Design},
title = {Tangible Beats: a collaborative user interface for creating musical beats},
year = {2014},
pages = {304-307},
keywords = {tangible user interfaces, interactive art, collaborative music interface, exploratory design},
month = {November},
}