RGB pressure sensitive Monome

2008-09-06 00:00:00 -0700

One of my first projects at CNMAT was a collaboration with Adrian Freed. Our goal was to build upon ideas present in the Monome, which has the limitation of on/off status for button interactions.

One way to circumvent this is to augment button toggles with pressure so that you simultaneously have pressure in one dimension, and a button with LED feedback in another. This idea can also be seen captured in newer devices like the Keith McMillen Instruments QuNeo, which has a similar topology, but implemented with MIDI. Instead of leaving the colorspace at a single LED, we also wanted each LED to have a uniquely addressable/showable color. Essentially the project became an RGB pressure sensitive Monome. Adrian had already worked out the tricky bits with resistive fabrics he had been experimenting with, and asked me to get the multiplexing and Arduino code set up. This project led into a research paper about the various technics and affordances beyond a standard Monome device.

My blog post: link

Adrian’s blog post: link