Augemented reality seems to becoming the new ‘in’ thing with regard to everything electronic. Latest on the Augmented agenda is the new 5 Gum Mixer that incorporates a web-camera with 5 symbol cards in a pre-defined space that when any one of their positions is altered it affects the music/ track that is being played.

Another augmented reality music experiment has been done by Todd Vanderlin. Vanderlin using pre-defined AR markers he has managed to track the vinyl in a 3D space.

“I was playing around with some AR markers the other day and came up with this idea. taking just a plain old vinyl record and attaching an AR marker to the label you can track the record in 3D space. The next question was, can you scratch the record?

So by figuring out the velocity of the records rotation and applying it to the payback of the audio you can scratch. There is some digital noise that needs to be worked out, but sounds pretty good. Its still really hard to scratch, it takes some practice but is super fun. The next step is to figure out some nice triggers for different modes. I like the idea of not needing a turntable but the actual spinning of the record helps with the scratching and playback. I made a couple modes, one where the record is paused and you can just scratch through the song. The other looks for zero velocity for x time and then continues on with the song. If there is velocity you then are scratching and the audio is affected. I think that this project has some legs can’t wait to play more.” - Vanderlin

A pretty innovative, exciting and interactive direction for music production, stay locked to us for further developments!

Adidas have taken the shoe into the depths of our binary reality….

It seems that augmented reality, real combined with the virtual is all the rage right now (remember the A.R. Parrot drone post [click here]?) well Adidas has created a virtual 3-D world that can be accessed using a line of five men’s sneakers. All you do is visit the adidas site and hold up their sneaker to their webcam. Each shoe has an augmented reality tag etched onto the tongue of the shoe, this allows you access to a virtual world which can be navigated, using the sneaker itself.

They will give us three games (one based on music, one on star wars and one skating game) for the range. Pretty rad…