PlanMixPlay is a modern take on how a multi-touch surface can be used as a live performance instrument. Touch technology has come a long way, but still suffers from significant short-comings that critically affect live performances:
- Latency.
- Haptics.
- Precision.
Latency is ever-improving, but still has some distance to go until it’s anywhere near as responsive as a drum, guitar, or even turntable. Haptics is an even more insurmountable obstacle, but we hear the people over at MIT are working on that. Precision is also tricky. To be fair, this due to both technology and chubby human fingers. But we love our chubby human fingers!
So while the smarter engineers tackle these problems upstairs, our team has come up with a much better solution. Simply walk around them. To do this, we came up with variable immediacy.
Variable immediacy side-steps most of these issues by introducing a variable delay between the artists actions and the resulting playback. It obviously isn’t suited for traditional live instruments (such as drums or guitars), but it’s a pretty cool new way of manipulating pre-recorded audio and video. It is crucial not to confuse the delay in playback with a delay in instrument response. We do our best to make sure PlanMixPlay is as responsible as the available hardware allows.
We would like thank the following lovely individuals without whom PlanMixPlay would not be what it is:
- Takeo Igarashi
- Masataka Goto
- Kenneth ‘Slaygon’ Mutka
- Makoto Nakajima
- and a number of other people too numerous to mention.