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A comment on Show HN: AirBending – hand gesture based macOS app MIDI controller.

Re:Show HN: AirBending – hand gesture based macOS app MIDI c... by blacksignal on Friday July 04, 2025 @06:23PM (#44468401)
Not just a ‘theremin’ — that totally downplays the power of midi. Someone else mentioned the mimu gloves, and I love the idea of a vision based controller - almost everyone has a phone, tablet or laptop with a camera, especially if theyre making music.

I also love that this could blur the lines of music playing and dance.

Great job OP, thanks for sharing.

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Re:Show HN: AirBending – hand gesture based macOS app MIDI c... by whilenot-dev on Saturday July 05, 2025 @04:02AM (#44470941)
The Leap Motion Controller came out in 2014 already (11 years ago, wow!) and isn't very expensive. The SDK was lacking in the beginning if I recall correctly, but a webcam seems to be inferior. Technology isn't the limiting factor for a quite some time now. I'm sure many projects existed to translate gestures to MIDI, some less polished, some more polished[0][1].

Reminds me... I even used two PlayStation Eyes (EUR 5 each) with OpenCV and the EVM algorithm[2] on a ThinkPad X230 for a dance performance piece back in 2015. Movements rather than gestures and OSC instead of MIDI, but it worked great!

[0]: https://midipaw.com/

[1]: https://uwyn.com/geco/

[2]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/

[ Parent | on HN ]