What?
A-MUSI-T (amusity) is a new way to access your music library while trying to bring back old habits of walking to a house and browsing through your friend’s record collection. Using a tangible user interface A-MUSI-T provides a new and unique experience.
A-MUSI-T offers a new way to interact with your music collection. A-MUSI-T is a concept for a coffee table that displays your music collection and allows you to play, watch and read up on about your songs. Each and every song in your collection is represented by a floating circle emanating from the center of the table and floating out. The album graphics of each song is displayed on the circle, these circles appear randomly and a few at a time as not to overwhelm the user.
Each circle maybe be activated using the thee tangable icons: the Speaker, the Television, and the “i”. By placing on of these icons on the circle you activate it and perform an action on the song.
The Speaker - Plays the song, the volume of the song can be controlled by turning the spearker as you would turn a volume knob.
The Television – Plays the music video of the song
The i – Displays the album art of the song in addition to information on the band and lyrics.
The user can use all three icons at the same time (but not on the same song), so you can hear your favorite Beatles song, while viewing the Aerosmith Pink video and learning a bit about Santa’s Black Magic Woman.
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Why?
The idea behind A-MUSI-T is to bring back the experience of walking in a friend’s house and browsing through their record library, handling each album, looking at the cover, turning it over and looking at the songs in the album, opening it up and reading the booklet. This experience has been lost with the move to digital music, now all the music is tucked a way in your private computer, never to be seen. And if you want to browse through the music you are overwhelmed with rows of information.
A-MUSI-T wants to bring back that music collection to the living room while allowing even more features by using the technology of the digital age, now you can of course listen to every song, but you can also view the music clip or read up on the artist and song.
Who?
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How?
A-MUSI-T is based on the Reactable technology. Using the Reactable fiducal recognition software we where able to identify the Icons using a webcam pointed at the surface and send their location to an Adobe Flash movie that responds and displays appropriate information.
The flash movie is then projected on the a Milky Plexiglass screen (via rear projection) and displayed to the user.
In order to separate the webcam and icon identification from the projected image, we had to modify the webcam so that it can only see infrared light and not visible light, this was done first by removing the infrared filter from the webcam, and the placing two sheets of developed film in order to filter all visible light but let the infrared light pass.
Testing the projection and image recognition
Next we had to light up the interior of the table with infrared light so that the camera will be able to see the icons. This was done by creating an array of infrared LED around the top of the table, just under the Plexiglass surface. We used over 100 LEDs that where set up just right so that they light up the entire surface but don’t create too much light so that they don’t create glares and reflections on the bottom side of the Plexiglass that in turn create dead areas in which the camera cannot recognize the icons.
Infrared Camera View From Inside
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