Thin Air | Devpost

Inspiration

They say music is the universal language. That point hit me recently, when I saw a video about a small, poor village that was built on top of a landfill. The children of the village barely had enough to live on, let alone have instruments to play. Yet, through the ingenuity of the villagers, they made lemons out of lemonade and created functional musical instruments from trash, and in time they managed to create an orchestra with these instruments. Upon seeing this, my first thought was to how they could create the larger instruments, xylophones and drums and the like. Entering SD hacks, an easier solution came to my mind, although instruments are hard to come by and unlikely to be donated, donated smart phones could be used to create these instruments, seemingly out of thin air.

What it does

Thin air uses augmented reality targets that are tracked by a smart phone to simulate instruments on paper, yet maintaining some of the tactile feel of the real thing.

How I built it

We used Unity and the augmented reality library Vuforia to track the image targets in real world space, and placed tracking markers on the mallets to know which notes are being struck.

Challenges I ran into

We had trouble initially with getting smaller objects (i.e. the mallets) to be tracked by the phone.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Doing something this cool with just an iPhone camera and paper.

What I learned

Augmented reality targets can be very fickle, and things such as the lighting of your station become essential. Also, you are limited by the hardware available.