Now you can play the world's tiniest violin: Google sensors detect tiny movements to play music
Playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s tiniest violin is no longer just a sarcastic dream.
Using a tiny-radar based chip, the team at Design I/O built a device that detects the movements of this unsympathetic gesture and transforms them into a violin solo.
This innovation is based on Google’s Project Soli, which uses invisible radar emanating from a chip to recognize finger movements and broad beam radar to detect movement, velocity and distance.
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Silo works by using the 60Ghz radar spectrum at up to 10,000 frames per seconds.
These movements are then translated into commands that mimic touches on a screen.
The 'World’s Tiniest Violin' is a ‘speed project’ that uses Googles technology, according to Creative Applications.
Design I/O detects if the user’s hand is making a motion that resembles two fingers moving together – as if they’re playing a mini violin.
Users simply place their thumb and forefinger over the device, start rubbing them together and a tune using just the string instrument will play – which some might deem the saddest tune in the world.
And when you stop ‘playing’, so does the Soli.
To build this tiny violin, the team first taught the Wekinator different finger movements that represent the playing of a violin and which ones are not acceptable.
Using the software, the team recorded different movements and assigned an output value of 1.0 on the Wekinator slider.
Then they set the slider to 0.0 to record gestures the system should reject.
‘After a few minutes of recording these gestures, the ‘training’ was initiated and they were then able to send back an animated value ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 representing how much the hand looked like it was trying to play a tiny violin,’ says Creative Applications.
And the final step mapped the number to the volume of the violin ample that was being played back by the openFrameworks app.
Google unveiled Project Soli last year, which was the brain child of Ivan Poupyrev – technical program lead for the search giant.
'Using a tiny, microchip-based radar to track hand movements we can now track the minutest movements and twitches of the human hand to interact with computers and wearable devices,’ he told MailOnline.com.
To build this tiny violin, the team first taught the Wekinator different finger movements that represent the playing of a violin and which ones are not acceptable. Using the software, the team recorded different movements and assigned an output value of 1.0 on the Wekinator slider
The whole world is becoming a gadget that we interact with, with software everywhere, which raises the question how can we react with the entire world?'
The Russian inventor's reply is to track our finger movements creating virtual dials, touchpads, and more.
Google's Project Soli uses invisible radar emanating from a microchip to recognize finger movements.
In particular, it uses broad beam radar to recognize movement, velocity and distance.
It works using the 60Ghz radar spectrum at up to 10,000 frames per seconds.
The team said its biggest challenge was to shrink a shoebox-sized radar - typically used by police in speed traps - into something tiny enough to fit on a microchip.
Inspired by advances in communications being readied for next-generation Wi-Fi called Wi-Gig, Poupyrev's team shrank the components of a radar down to millimeters in just 10 months, while working with German chip maker Infineon.