Re: doing much on thursday? (uk)

Richard Povall (Richard.Povall@oberlin.edu)
Mon, 16 Jun 1997 10:16:03 -0400 (EDT)

>>-guy
>>
>>btw (though I suppose this might have made a post in its own right),
>>recently the UK music press has been carrying news of a product called
>>the Dimension Beam which converts movement in space (though how large a
>>space I'm not sure) to MIDI. Off the shelf at about £350. I can post
>>further details if anybody's interested, and I'm hoping to demo one
>>later this week. There's a review (of sorts) in the current Future
>>Music, too.
>
>Sounds like STEIM's 'bigeye' -- would be great if you could post some
>details and maybe get into a conversation with Richard Povall and/or Mark
>Coniglio regarding how it compares with 'bigeye' (if at all). Also Sher
>Doruff, who is reading this list, has been quite involved with 'bigeye'.
>

Definitely be interesting to hear more about Dimension Beam - although I
have to admit that those kind of systems have rarely worked well for me in
the past. There was a system knocking around in the UK called MIDIBeam or
something like that. It was OK, but didn't really work well for dance
performance (IMHO). These kinds of distance-sensing systems are certainly
very different from BigEye, which is a much more in-depth motion analysis
and sensing system, capable of looking at motion in a number of different
ways. Most of the IR beam sensing systems I've seen merely sense distance
from their source. I did a project with six of them, but there was MASSES
of spurious data coming into the system that was very difficult to deal
with, even using a variety of filters with MAX.

Maybe Dimension Beam is different....

R

R i c h a r d P o v a l l
Assoc. Prof of Computer Music and New Media
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email: Richard.Povall@oberlin.edu
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