Siftables – a game-changer
Interchangeable resequencable customizable and brilliant human-computer interface that I feel pretty sure we’ll feel the effect of not long down the line.
Living in the future can be pretty friggin cool sometimes.
EDIT: don’t ask me why it doesn’t show up as a link even though it’s clickable, but the phrase “human-computer interface” is a link. URL is http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html
Yeah man those are dope.
I’ve been into the interactive and haptic control scene for a while.
(I built a multitouch object tracking bar table a while back).
I’ve been looking at building a low cost small sized device using the same technology that I can use as a MIDI controller. Just I’ve got so many projects on and my job is hectic as atm this got put on the back burner, a long with my dynamic audiomatically generated visualisation software (with intergrated midi controls), and interactive motion tracking dance floor :[
Anyway Its going to be based on this software, its fucking dope. If I get onto the project I will setup some instructions on how to build it and set it up for yourself. I’ve tested it and trust me… it fucking owns.
i cant watch the video, but that site rocks!
@midian-what does haptic mean? is that like fuzzy logic?
Haptic means touch and spacial information. IE a mixer uses haptic interaction (touching/turning the pots), but its very very basic, you can use haptic / touch and spacial information way more. IE How objects are in relation to one another etc.
ah i see. so what youre using is a higher definition? and/or higher dimensional?(2d as opposed to pots that are linear?)
haptic interaction just means how we sense & interact with the space around us physically. Rather then observation through vision & sound. It is actually made up of lots of senses (heat, pressure, gravity etc). Haptics is primarily how we interact with the world around us rather then it being largely a 1 way thing (ie observation), as with sight & sound.
Yep thats right, tho in fact it is in effect 3 dimensions.
X (horizontal), Y (vertical), & R (Rotation).
Imagine Each of your pots also being a touch pad (X,Y). and you can put as many as can fit in the space on. Also the haptics comes into play more with the fact that the objects (super xy pots) can react in relation to one another rather then just independantly.
EG.
You can have 8 objects, which represent 4 elements (drums, bass, pads, effects) for 2 tracks as well as 1 extra object in the middle.
Placing the 4 objects on the left and the other 4 on the right (y, vertical axis being volume). The middle object can then be moved left and right between the two groups of 4 objects to act like a crossfader. It can also be moved vertically to act as a highpass filter and rotated to increase/decrease effects.
and this is just a BASIC setup.
nifty, cant wait to see that shizz
Anyway, I think the siftables are pretty damn cool.
There was a blog post about this if you guys missed it - The Future of Control? - DJ TechTools
actually its still on the front page of the blog, wasnt that long ago.
Yeah thats how I found out about those thingys :]
cute piece of kit, but i can’t get into siftables. the design seems more evolutionary than it is being recognized for, having not moved all that far from the sensetable project for which the research was published in 2001!, follow on project audiopad, later projects loopqoob or even reactable (who’s project site seems to be down, you can quickly see it in action on these two youtube videos here and here) which was well received at SONAR a couple years back. so 8 years later, we get what – a mini LCD block that offers the killer application of a physical digital-magnetic-poetry version of the speak-and-spell and speak-and-math? feels a bit like technology searching for a problem to solve.
yeah, the ted format doesn’t let them talk at much depth, the additional videos on project member david merrill’s academic project page don’t really discuss in any further depth. the team has since left the media lab and formed a company to commercialize the project – siftables commercial site. i’d have to imagine they aren’t showing all their cards until they are ready to go to market, but i do hope they offer something more compelling than what has already seen.
The beginning of Skynet!!
As I said, I think we’ll feel the effect of this technology down the line, not right now. And I think your simplistic reduction of its current ability fails to recognize its enormous potential. Did you watch the whole video? Let’s see a Speak & Spell help you set up a Fibonacci series. I had exactly the feeling seeing this that I had on first seeing Ableton Live v1.0 at NAMM – I couldn’t fully wrap my brain around it at the same time I saw a massively flexible and adaptable template for creativity. Anyway, my 2 cents’ worth.
yes, i did watch the video as well as read the paper the team published and am familiar with the research of several of related projects. the project is cute, but i think the high innovation and disruptive technology badges being tossed about, are premature at best. perhaps our differences could be better described by an earthquake - i view siftables as an aftershock, not the main shock as it were.
the world we live in seems to now only book over-hyped prize fights that [a] end in the first round end after someone gets their ear bitten off or never happen in the first place as one or more contenders can't make weight. rarely are we treated to the match we had hoped for. everything is hyper-dramatic now, no one just bows out but instead they go down in a fireball the sun could be proud of. user and market expectation can become entirely unmanageable when you are propped up by misappropriated fad, which can easily end in the pear shaped flame-out, disappointment.
Well. Time will tell, wonit?
These physically based interfaces always bug me. The first thing the Reacttable and Sitable people do is make a “music” app that plays back prerecorded loops and magically makes it sound interesting. I’ve never seen one used in any way that can be considered DJ-like.
The problem comes form timing - the latencies on these devices are always fairly loose. On reactable, to start a sound you need to place the object and “turn it up” by physically rotating the object, so there’s never any synchronization issues as you always fade in. Effects are applied to sound source by “locality”, as you bring objects close to each other they establish connections and the effect is turned on, but you never get to say exactly when the connection is made so applying an effect to a sound source is hard to make musically precise. The sound sources themselves are usually short loops or arpeggiated triggering of noises, handily sidestepping the problems of locating cues in a track or scrolling through large sound files to get to interesting points. Click-to-play and click-to-stop are not enough.
It’s points like these that bug me. They never do anything a couple of MIDI NoteOn or CC events can’t do, and they always do it with a mushy, imprecise time frame. I remain unimpressed.
There is no reason you can’t link it to DJ software. The main one for this would be the TUIO stuff which is used with reactable, but you can edit to so that it can be used with midi. I’ve used this tech myself and yes it does have some latency BUT this is all to do with gear, get a decent camera (the PS3 camera is actually fucking good!) and this becomes less of an issue and is definately usable for performance in a DJ set.
Watch that video I posted earlier, it has him using it with DAW software. The realms that are possible with this are pretty amazing.