On saturday I participated in the scrapyard challenge. We essentially made a motorized flail and tried to use it to complete circuits, which consisted of square pieces of tinfoil, wired directly into the arduino board/box. Our goal was to make an instrument that leaned on the side of giving agency to the musician, instead of embracing the randomness of physically computed midi compositions. We only made one note play and that sometimes didn’t even work. I still feel like we learned something.
My feedback loop was designed for gesture interfaces. It hints at what gesture is currently being recognized as the user is drawing it. I thought this could be practical since so many interfaces are returning to tactile input (touch, motion). The most frustrating aspect of gesture interfaces is false positives, so I wanted to give the user a way to anticipate their input and correct it, without trial and error. I think that users of touch and natural interfaces will eventually need a language of input that is more efficient than an onscreen keyboard (while still having the same extent of vocabulary).
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