Space Palette - A New Instrument for Music and Visuals

Space Palette^™ - A New Instrument for Music and Visuals

The Space Palette is a Kinect-based instrument used to perform music and graphics simultaneously, using no pre-recorded media and controlled directly by your hands. It's like having four (or more) 3D mousepads in mid-air. The picture above shows the latest version, in a performance at STEIM in Amsterdam. Another recent performance can be found in this open house performance. The oval version first appeared at the Sea of Dreams 2012 New Year's Eve party in San Francisco. A previous version of the Space Palette can be seen in this video of people playing with it at Burning Man 2011 and Decompression 2011. Search YouTube for "Space Palette" to find other videos.

Details

Technical details about the latest version can be found in these slides from a talk about the Space Palette. My code for visuals and music is now implemented as a FreeFrame 1.5 (OpenGL-based) plugin running inside of Resolume (which I highly recommend). Source code and a Windows executable for the core bit of software (that talks to the Microsoft Kinect, recognizes your hands within an arbitrary flat surface with holes, and sends out TUIO/OSC messages that can drive whatever you want to control) is available here. That version is very old, though - if you're interested in a more recent version of that software, send email to me (literally) at timthompson.com.

Gallery

Media Coverage

One of the first was from Mark Mosher's ModulateThis blog. Here's another interview and article about the first version. Mark recently published an update on the most recent version of the Space Palette

Credits

Many thanks to Fred Lakin for suggestions and sketches that led to the current oval frame design, and many enjoyable discussions about user interfaces and performing visuals. His book Live Graphics Nightly is inspiring and recommended. Thanks to Vivian Wenli Lin for the video recording of my STEIM performance. "Space Palette" is a trademark of Nosuch Media. My personal site describing other work is timthompson.com.