Demo: Feel the pressure - A haptic-feedback device for wearable musical instrument interaction

Abstract

Wearable gestural interfaces for effect control during concerts enable artists to experiment with new ways to express their work. These interfaces can be seen as novel musical instruments, however compared to traditional musical instruments they often lack fine-grained haptic feedback. The artist effectively plays these instrument "blind". In this paper, we present an easily built pressure-feedback device to close the loop between gesture interaction and haptic feedback. This can give the artist an idea of the currently enabled musical effect, and indicates the strength of this effect which can serve as a warning signal when the effect reaches a otherwise invisible limit with respect to a starting gesture. To evaluate the system, study participants were asked to distinguish different levels of pressure, giving insights on the accuracy of such a haptic interface.