robjsoftware.info

Allow me to demonstrate:

My last post was all about my big plans for making this thing, and now, here it is:  a Kinect-and-Wiimote-based live looping instrument, or soundspace, or synesthizer… not sure yet quite which.

It came together much faster than expected, under the very motivating mid-August realization that Beardyman (my inspiration) was playing Vancouver in mid-September, and that if I got a demo ready, maybe I could… show him!

Beardyman and Me?!

Lo and behold, after a frenzied and down-to-the-wire month of hacking, I had it working.  I recorded a (slightly NSFW) video, emailed it to him, and he saw it the day before his show.  It piqued his interest.

The next day there we were, ready to rock the world:

Beardyman is a down-to-earth guy, super friendly and gracious, exploding with ideas, and damn near as impressed with my work as I am with his.  (That last fact was a total shock, and a delightful one.)

And he tried it out!

(The mellow dude in the background is Ian, Darren’s tour manager.)

So, um, yeah, I’m pretty blown away right now.  As a huge bonus, I got to see his show that night, where he played some of the sickest and most intense drum and bass I’ve ever heard, making it all right there on the spot:

I can’t believe this all happened only a week ago.  It’s been dizzying and unforgettable.

So, Yes, Holofunk Is A Thing

Specifically, it is a thing right here:  http://holofunk.codeplex.com — warts and all.  You can download it and play with it if you like, and I quite encourage you to!  (You do need Visual Studio 2010 — this is a hacker’s project right now.)

It came together really amazingly rapidly.  XNA and C# were good rapid development choices, and the Kinect SDK and Wiimote libraries were both pretty much completely trouble-free.

But the single best technical choice was the BASS audio library.  I am very grateful to everyone who steered me in that direction.  I am using only the freeware version, but the questions I posted on their support forum got unbelievably prompt and complete responses from the two main developers.  If it weren’t for their help, there’s no way I would have been done on time.  I can’t recommend their project highly enough.

What It Is, And Isn’t

The open source site goes into much more detail, but basically, what you see above is what you currently get.  Beardyman and I had about a million ideas for what could be next.  Some of the ones I plan to experiment with over the next several months:

• Pulling live video from the Kinect camera and animating it instead of just using colored circles.  (Imagine Monkey Jazz, live.)
• Extracting the frequency and using it to colorize a sound trail (so you can literally paint with the loops).
• Adding sound effects.
• Chopping up and sub-looping your loops (possibly integrated with the video and/or sound trail).
• ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Another reason to do this is that the latest information on Win8 says that XNA, which I’m using as the game framework for Holofunk, is not going to be supported for the new tablet-style Metro apps.  Holofunk would make a great Metro app, so moving away from XNA for all media management is a good way to go.  I may wind up doing the whole thing in C++ just to avoid ever having to deal with random memory management interruptions from the runtime.

But I’m going to take a bit of a break for the next month or so.  If people are interested I will support all comers, but this was a big push to make this Beardyman awesomeness happen, and it’s time to personally ease up a bit 🙂

I would love to have some active collaborators on this thing.  There’s too much potential here for just one guy.  I also have a Holofunk Facebook group for anyone who wants to stay in touch with all Holofunkian doings.

However, before signing off:

Two More Tastes

This thing is so new and so raw that I feel I very much don’t have a handle on it yet, but here’s one more attempt.

And, finally, a guest appearance by my daughter:

Sophia is six.  I wanted Holofunk to be something she could play with and have fun.  And even that seems to have succeeded!