The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface.(hard to know what it is? Directly watch the below Video, So cool!) Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. The reactable hardware is based on a translucent, round multi-touch surface. A camera situated beneath the table, continuously analyzes the surface, tracking the player's finger tips and the nature, position and orientation of physical objects that are distributed on its surface. These objects represent the components of a classic modular synthesizer, the players interact by moving these objects, changing their distance, orientation and the relation to each other. These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer. Check out see the Reactable live in Berlin.
This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jord¨¤, Martin Kaltenbrunner, G¨šnter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain ReacTIVision,the software driving the reacTable is an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. It was mainly designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces.
