LEMUR!!! I broke down and bought one. I probably shouldnt have but hey, I am a sucker for nice things. Especially if they light up. Oh and triple especially if they happen to also be multi-touch user interfaces.

I am still getting the hang of it. It is highly customizable. Much more so than I thought it would be. But it is certainly not 100% customizable and there are definitely a couple things I would have wanted from it (considering the price), but overall, I am satisfied with the purchase and look forward to putting it to good use.

It was fairly easy to get it working with Processing. I ended up using the oscP5 library which allows Processing to send and receive OpenSound Control messages, which is one of the two ways the Lemur can communicate (the other being MIDI).

I am going to spend some time figuring out a good system that I can use with all my sketches. I know I will need a good camera controller. I will probably research arcballs and implement one because the Lemur has a nice ‘ring’ module that would be perfect for arcball control.

There will also be a set of triggers for controlling the major transitions. Ideally, these triggers would control in-Lemur effects instead of me having to code them into the Processing sketch. For example, I could make a trigger that spins the camera to a random position and velocity. Since the ‘ring’ module will control the camera, I am going to see if I can make the trigger simple send the ring dragger to a random position within the ring and by default, the camera in processing would self adjust. If I cannot make this happen, no biggie. I will just make a custom class template that will handle the everyday tasks I would want of all the AV sketches I make.

Quick test (audio by Alpha).

Mostly just getting acquainted with my layout. The Lemur does fine picking up the soft fleshy pads of the finger, but I am having better responsiveness by using my fingernails. I have the camera controller in the upper right. I have a set of pads below the camera controller which are the makings of a drum pad for the custom triggers. The upper left sliders control the gravity orbs. The ones just to the right control the particles.

In the lower left, you will see the only example of bidirectional communication with the Lemur in this layout. Processing is picking up input from the Lemur, but it also sends back a 40 band frequency spectrum which I render to the Lemur’s screen using the multi-slider module.

The multiball in the lower right does nothing for now, but I threw it in there so every now and then I can scream “MULTIBALL!!!” and frighten my boyfriend. I also took the time to code in the cartesian coordinates for all the Platonic Solids. For those who don’t know what Platonic solids are, picture the standard set of D&D dice, excluding the 10 sided one. Those things.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 3:15 am and is filed under Flight404 News, Processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.