The Haptic Conductor won the prize to the best project at the 2017 Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media showcase at UPF. I developed it together with Joe Munday and Antek Metzler as the final project for the Advanced Interface Design course in the SMC Masters at UPF.
It is an interactive system that augments the expressive gestures of a conductor by embodying them on the musicians in the form of haptic feedback. By complementing the traditional visual feedback, the aim of this system is to improve the synchronisation between conductor and musician in a transparent and unobtrusive way.
The Haptic Conductor is implemented in Processing. The tracking of the conductor is done using a Kinect and the SimpleOpenNI library. Simple IIR filtering as proposed by UIO research is used to measure the acceleration of the conductor’s hand and detect the timing, strength and orientation of the beats. This information is sent via Bluetooth to an Arduino-controlled vibrotactile belt that delivers it to the musician in the form of haptic feedback. Check it out on GitHub here.