A distributed theremin, powered by a Leap Motion controller, a user-interface device that tracks the user's hand motions.
Using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (preferred in that general order), go to: http://skynetheremin.herokuapp.com/
Click and drag on the screen to make your own music.
During a demonstration, you should also hear music coming from the sky.
To install all libraries for this app, pull the code and run:
npm install
The post-install hooks should also grab the bower libraries.
There are three major components: the server, the broadcaster, and the web client.
The server is a lightweight express app written in node. Basically all it does is handle websockets between the web clients, and re-broadcasts information from the broadcaster to each web client.
To run the server locally:
node app/server.js
The server makes use of require.js's r.js optimization script to speed up file retrieval. This should run automatically when npm install is run. To re-run, issue the following command:
node node_modules/.bin/r.js -o requirebuild.js
To turn off the use of this optimized file (i.e. while testing), comment out the appropriate line in require-main.js.
The broadcaster handles reading information from the Leap Motion, and sending that information to the server. It makes use of Cylon.js to translate between the Leap Motion and give you callbacks that you can override in reaction to sensor events.
To run the broadcaster:
node app/broadcaster.js [target] [--debug]
Ex:
node app/broadcaster.js http://skynetheremin.herokuapp.com/ --debug
Press spacebar to start and stop broadcasting.
The web client has been tested on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. (Tested on Mavericks.) The main features are:
- Accepts mouse dragging inputs from the user to create sound
- Renders sound into a pleasant-looking visualization
- Establishes a connection to the remote server to receive instructions from the broadcaster
The sound is synthesized using Web Audio.
The basic UI was inspired by (and/or reverse-engineered from) the Theremin by Femur Designs.
This node app is set up to deploy to heroku. To do so, websockets must be enabled. In addition, the buildpack should be set to the node.js pack:
heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs
heroku labs:enable websockets
For more information, check out the following articles: