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Global economic recession cutting into your gear purchases?

The team at d-touch.org may have a solution: a drum machine that you print with your computer printer.

The d-touch drum machine is a software drum machine with a tangible user interface: it is controlled by placing and arranging physical objects on an A4 piece of paper, which is known as the interactive area.

The interactive area is arranged in 11 rows, each row corresponds to a different sound, as indicated by the text labels. The the placement of the blocks on the interactive area determines the timing of sounds triggered by the blocks.

Check out the video, above, to see how this works.

The d-touch is a free download and works on Windows, OS X or Linux. If you give it a try, leave a comment and let us know how it worked for you.

James Lewin
Twitter @podcasting_news

More Information
• d-touch.org

At first I thought it was a hoax, but once I learned how it works, I was impressed.

30-Jun-09 05:45 AM

Well, I'm still in the "it must be a hoax" phase, can you explain? Or would you have to kill me?

30-Jun-09 10:09 AM

You use a webcam and it recognises where you plonk the cubes on the paper... fantastic fun and impressive too. I hope my 5 year old son is equally impressed with it when I show it to him tomorrow! Tony www.captive.co.uk

30-Jun-09 03:54 PM

I don't think its a hoax. It is a nifty application written for an open-source pattern recognition software library.

It says you need a webcam, and you presumably point it above the page that the boxes are placed on, and based on where it detects the shapes printed on the cardboard cubes relative to where they are on the page, determines the sound to use and the step to trigger.

You'll notice the page stuck to the table has markers on it and that presumably calibrates the image detection software.

Heres the URL for more info: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/29/d-touch-tangible-drum-interface/

Clever!

30-Jun-09 04:04 PM

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