Essential Reality
June 28, 2007 8:26 pmHardware hacking can be paradoxical in that those who practice the art often use older technology to create entirely novel effects.
Quite often the object being experimented upon is an obsolesced children’s toy. One of the most popular hacks is bending circuits on Speak & Spells to create distorted or pitch-shifted versions of the original output, and someone has even bent the circuits on a defenseless furby.
For musicians, the possibilities are exciting not only because new sounds are being generated, but because new ways of playing sound are being realised as well. Earlier this week I attended the inaugural Portland DorkBot gathering, where one such new path was demonstrated by software designer and DorkBot organizer Jason Plumb.
The device Plumb wore and played was called the Essential Reality P5 Glove, and is as Plumb describes “a glove controller that provides a human-computer interface in 11 dimensions (x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw, and 5 individual finger bends).”
Click the image for a short video clip of Plumb demonstrating how the glove can be used to control audio, and read after the jump for a great interview with him as well.
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