The twin towers : a remote sensing device for controlling live-interactive computer music

In thè Computer Music activity area, the design of original man-machine interfaces for controlling interactive live computer music performances is taken into consideration. In this context we designed and carried out the TwinTowers device which detects information from movements of the hands with no kind of physical connection with them: it consists of two sets of four infra-red sensing devices which create two zones of the space (the vertical edges of two square-based parallelepipedon, or towers) where the hands can be detected in terms of distance and front and side rotations with respect to a reference frame, using the values of the four heights of each tower. The system implements a sort of double aerial three-dimensional joy sticks. Originally developed for on-stage musical performances, the Twin-towers can be considered as a general purpose remote sensing device to be used in a wide range of applications such as games, mouse-like operations and 3-D pointing device for CAD-like applications.