So, this has been a long time coming. I bought a Kinect over break and wanted to do a little project to mess around with it. AirSample is that little project.
Originally, I was planning to do a synthesizer that created square waves with a frequency that depended on the position of each hand. I actually wrote some new classes for a C# audio library for it to work. It was okay, but ended up crackling really badly and having a terrible response time. C# is just not good for dynamic audio synthesis like that.
After that, I decided to just use samples. I found some samples online from an ARP Solina and decided to run with that. The system works with an arbitrary number of samples (right now, they're hard-coded, but I plan on changing it so it knows what samples to load from an XML file soon). You can move each hand upward to make it louder, or downward to make it softer. Each hand is independent. There is a dead-zone at the bottom of the tracking area (about 1/4 of the total area) which will result in silence. The notes are displayed on the screen, as are the positons of each hand. You can pick your note by moving it to the dead-zone, then to the correct x-coordinate, then moving it upwards out of the dead zone.
I'm thinking about porting this to Processing using the OpenNI and NITE Kinect drivers so I can make it cross platform. As of now, I just wanted to get started with Microsoft's SDK.
I'll be posting the code soon, when it's in a more usable state.
Some of you might remember StoriTell, the website I built for anonymous story sharing? Well, now it needs your help. As you may know, I'm currently involved in a fairly intense, year-long master's program at Carnegie Mellon University. Which means I don't have time for a job. Which means I can no longer pay for the dedicated server at Rackspace that StoriTell is running on. I've already spent around $600 on what is essentially an experiment in anonymous literature. Every penny of that has been worth it. Some of the stories that have gotten shared have been heartbreaking, moving and all-together some of the most incredible bits of reality I've ever seen on the Internet.
The storytelling power of the internet is often forgotten in the short social media updates we post without thinking every day. I continue to believe that something like StoriTell should exist as a way for meaningful stories to be shared online. But, as I mentioned, I can't keep paying Rackspace for the server when I don't have a job.
That's where you come in.
Over the last few months, I've been working on an Android app for StoriTell, letting you read stories wherever you are on whatever device you have with you. It works great on phones and would look even better on tablets.
It costs $1. My hope is that enough people buy this app that I can afford the $12/mo plan I currently have. If not, I'll be moving to a shared host that won't support some of the current features of the site (like search, for example). I don't want to have to do this. Not because it's a pain to do or anything like that, but because I want the experience of using StoriTell to remain the best it can be. I hope you'll agree. For just $1, you can help make sure it stays that way.
Thank you.
UPDATE: The app now has an ad-supported, free version! Check it out here.
