Quadrant

Name: Quadrant
SKU: 16927
Price: 65.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.75 (2 reviews)

(2 Reviews)

4-dimensional theremin / hand-tracking interface

Designed by Interstitial in United States of America

2019-05-07T03:59:47.631Z-IMG_20190419_042727.jpg

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4-dimensional theremin / hand-tracking interface

What is it? Quadrant is a human-computer interface based on an array of distance sensors. The hardware consists of 4 time-of-flight sensors and is specifically designed to detect the position, veloci…

What is it?

Quadrant is a human-computer interface based on an array of distance sensors. The hardware consists of 4 time-of-flight sensors and is specifically designed to detect the position, velocity, and orientation of the user’s hand in free space. Signal processing techniques are used to recognize gestures and other events, which can be mapped to a variety of musical parameters in software. We have developed Quadrant as an open-hardware circuit board which acts as a USB controller to a host computer.

Why did you make it?

This project developed from an interest in gestural interfaces for music. We had some promising early results with arrays of photometric distance sensors, but ultimately the low range, rampant cross-talk, and susceptibility to ambient light conditions motivated us to look beyond these basic sensors. Recent advances in time-of-flight technology presented the opportunity to switch to a far more accurate and robust class of sensors. By shrinking the array to just 4 sensors, we were able to keep the BOM affordable while still offering a broad range of interaction paradigms. Finally, to make the interface as widely applicable as possible, we decided.to make it open source hardware with a simple USB serial connection.

What makes it special?

It's fast, accurate, multi-channel distance sensing in a minimal, open-hardware package that can be adapted to a variety of use cases.

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Review Breakdown

Average Ratings

Product: (5.00)

Documentation: (4.50)

Shipping: (5.00)

Communication: (4.50)

Marvin | April 11, 2021

Awesome!

I'm using the Quadrant to control a synthesizer written in Pure Data. It allows you to play much more expressively, especially if you don't have a velocity sensitive keyboard. There are so many more things I have yet to try out (send midi to hardware synthesizers, play around with gestures, create entire instruments based on it, place it under a plant and capture its movement, mix quadrophonic audio, ...).

There are example Python scripts that help you get started. Basically you get four values from the board representing the proximity of an object to the sensors. You can do whatever you like with these values: Calculate the angle, measure the acceleration, recognize swipe gestures, ...
The sensors are pretty fast and precise, too.
If you have some Python skills you can easily expand the example scripts. Of course you can also use any other language or tool of your choice that reads serial data. Even if you don't program, you can just run a script that sends the sensor values to Pure Data or via midi and handle the rest from there.

The quadrant is a great device. I hope more people will pick one up, I'm curious what they'll come up with.

Kang | June 4, 2019

Goooood product !

I thought it would take more time for the goods to arrive. Thank you for the quick delivery.
The Quadrant is well designed and works very well.
Now I've only do trial run, but I'm going to use it when try on the center of gravity.
I love Quadrant that inspired me.