As many of you smartphone users are already aware, touch screens are pretty cool. They’re shiny, allow you to perform some nifty tasks, and overall make your life a lot easier with fluid and intuitive capacitive controls. Not everything is ideal for a fragile electronics display though. But according to Technology Review, some truly remarkable experimental work is being done by Bruno Zamborlin and his team who and are trying to address that very problem with the culmination of their efforts resulting in the Mogees mini mic.
What is Mogees? Well, according to Zamborlin,” Mogees is an interactive gesture-based device for realtime audio mosaicing.” Through the use of gesture recognition techniques and microphones, Mogees can detect different types of interaction and assign various sounds. For example: tapping with your finger would elicit a different sound than striking a surface with your palm. The system developed by Zamborlin can even differentiate between fingers and other objects that emit sounds such as coins, pencils, etc.
Still a little confused? That’s ok because Zamborlin isn’t entirely specific on some of the details either. In fact by looking at the video demo below we get a greater sense of what Mogees can accomplish. As you can see, Mogees does indeed emit sound when attached to a flat surface, but we don’t actually see what is emitting that sound or what it’s attached to — only that it’s recognized and transmuted into audible sounds (most likely by using some nearby laptop).
Could “concatenative synthesis,” as Zamborlin calls it, be the next step in touch interfaces? Maybe, though right now it seem too early to tell, but the idea of hooking up Mogees mini microphones to practically anything and making some cool beats is certainly intriguing.
