work in progress

La Boîte à oiseaux is a combination of 3 projects:

• Singing birds
• Biscuit box computer
• Kiku

It’s a media center built in an amplified box with speech recognition capabilities. La boîte can understand as many languages as Kiku offers (currently English, Japanese, German & Portuguese) and since Kiku works offline, there’s no need to be connected to the internet.

Video

so i needed to get in shape (still do): borrowed an exercise bike from a friend. i wanted to see the biggest cities in the world while doing so: google earth. all that was missing was a way to control google earth from the bike: kinect and the speech recognition sdk.

Video

Source

my solution is a modification of this project: Kinect Excercise. added speech recognition (let me ride… a big city) and some keyboard shortcut and mouse automation for google earth (using http://www.autoitscript.com) + OSC for an upcoming project (small game based on this concept). you can download the hacky c# project.

i finally found something useful to do with my kinect: tracking the neck of a guitar and using gesture recognition to control the FX rack of a pure data patch.

Video

Guitar neck tracking

i used the natural interaction middleware hand tracking example (PointViewer) and added open sound control (liblo). latency is 33ms. you can download the source and the executable for linux (64bit).

Gesture recognition

i am using the neat gesture recognition toolkit by Nick Gillian. using the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) example (coded in openframeworks), i simply added open sound control to send the predicted gesture to pure data. you can download the source and the executable for linux (64bit).

Pure Data

nothing fancy here, just a patch to send the tracking via osc to the gesture recognition i get back the result from it, apply some FX to an incoming signal using X, Y, Z. you can download the patch.

The “Not-just-for-sci-fi electronic instrument” that is played without being touched + a graphic tablet on top & some very simple electronics in the case (power / convert the theremin via USB). Both antennas (control voltage for volume and pitch) are routed to PureData.

The patch is really just a bridge (open sound control) to MyPaint (open-source graphics application for digital painters). Right now the volume is linked to the diameter of the brush and the pitch is linked to the brightness color (this can be changed in the code see below).

BTW this is the beauty of the open source movement: had the idea in the morning, talk to some people on #mypaint in the afternoon, hack the source for my needs during the night and went to bed with a working prototype. Ready-made Solutions Require Ready-made Problems; For Everything Else There Is Open Source Software!

Video

Source

MyPaint: share/gui/document.py -> pyliblo server (receive from pd)

import liblo, sys
 
class Document (CanvasController):
	def __init__(self, app, leader=None):
		global created
		if(created == False):
			self.server = liblo.Server(9997)
			self.server.add_method("/mp/radius", 'f', self.oscradius)
			self.server.add_method("/mp/zoom", 'f', self.osczoom)
			self.server.add_method("/mp/rotate", 'f', self.oscrotate)
			gobject.timeout_add(20, self.pollcheck)
			created = True
 
    def oscradius(self, path, args):
        adj = self.app.brush_adjustment['radius_logarithmic']
        adj.set_value(args[0])
 
    def oscv(self, path, args):
        h, s, v = self.app.brush.get_color_hsv()
        v = args[0]
        if v < 0.005: v = 0.005
        if v > 1.0: v = 1.0
        self.app.brush.set_color_hsv((h, s, v))
 
    def osczoom(self, path, args):
        self.tdw.set_zoom(args[0])
 
    def oscrotate(self, path, args):
        self.tdw.set_rotation(args[0])
 
    def pollcheck(self):
        self.server.recv(10)        self.finished = False
        Stroke.serial_number += 1
        self.serial_number = Stroke.serial_number
        return True

MyPaint: share/mypaint/lib/stroke.py -> pyliblo client (send pressure, x, y to pd)

import liblo, sys
    def __init__(self):
        self.target = liblo.Address(1234)
 
    def record_event(self, dtime, x, y, pressure, xtilt,ytilt):
        self.tmp_event_list.append((dtime, x, y, pressure, xtilt,ytilt))
        liblo.send(self.target, "/mypaint/pressure", pressure)

PureData patch:

I wrote this software (based on JMDict) to learn new words in japanese. It’s written in C++ (wxWidgets) and use sqlite3. A compiled version for Windows is available for download (with installer / uninstaller). I am sharing the source, but i won’t recommend to learn from it (a cobe::blocks project).

Here’s a screenshot in Windows:

Here’s a screenshot in Ubuntu / Gtk:

Download the installer (for Windows, beta)
Download the source (code::blocks)