Re: [microsound] Lemur!

[ndkent <ndkent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > That's an absurd amount of money.... you can buy an 15" touchable lcd
> > from Wacom for $1000 less. OSC is nice, but not /that/ nice.
>
> I think the whole idea is that Lemur accepts multiple touch points at
> once. You can use all ten fingers at the same time if you wish.

I saw a live demo a little over a week ago and the multiple finger 
input was definitely a major departure (and impressive).

I gather what goes on is you have a programmer app that lets you 
arrange and lay out controller objects on the Lemur.

Right now they've developed 5 different objects. Most notable is X-Y 
area that allows multiple point input and behaviors of tracked points 
during after finger contact has been lifted. The others are more 
conventional. Buttons with programmable states, virtual faders, etc. 
You determine the exact OSC data being output by the controllers. You 
can use formulas for instance to output the ranges and sorts of data 
you want.

There was a mention that while the controller doesn't directly output 
pressure data they felt felt that they would eventually be able to 
interpret the change in the area of contact as something analogous to 
pressure info.

Something that I wouldn't consider a criticism that came to mind during 
the demo was that while the Lemur is incredibly seductive if you are 
playing it yourself,  the demo highlighted a bit of frustration from an 
audience's viewpoint in that it is intimate in size and while it can 
control a video performance (and I'm sure Jitter or GEM code could do 
something custom in terms visualizing the output) it's not outputting a 
capture-able visual or is itself on a large enough in scale to let the 
audience really in on the performance. That's something that visual 
tracking software (which has it's own pros and cons) does do 
compellingly from an audience perspective.

What to me seemed like an understandable though major criticism is 
overall you only have high level access to the Lemur end of things. For 
instance you can't go in and develop a new controller object, redesign 
the the graphics, in other words work on the Lemur side of things at a 
lower level. You can develop something in PD that interprets the OSC 
data from the Lemur any way but on the Lemur you are limited to the 
parameters of the provided controller objects and the layout of 
multiple controller objects.

One of the observers at the demo had a very valuable observation that 
hasn't yet been explored by the Lemur developers. As it stands there is 
no capability for an external app to update info on the Lemur screen. 
The controllers themselves most definitely update themselves and 
provide visual feedback but the controller info is streaming from the 
Lemur to your device (most likely an app or patch running on the same 
computer hosting the Lemur programmer app). Only the Lemur programmer 
app is sending updates from the outside world to the Lemur, I'd think 
this is a whole important area as a high end  flexible performance tool 
that needs to be addressed to take things from the seductively novel to 
being a potentially extremely valuable device to realize new custom 
performance interfaces.

nicholas d. kent
http://technopop.info/ndkent


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.microsound.org