[SigCHI] EOH is fizzle, here's the dizzle

[Joshua Benjamin <jebenjam@xxxxxxxx>]

It was a close call, but SigCHI managed to create a representative demo 
of the Gestural Music Interface for Engineering Open House, which was 
last weekend. It went very well. Kids, adults, and even pianists all 
enjoyed the GMI and gave a lot of good feedback. We also gained three 
enthusiastic members.

The biggest request from people is to be able to move through the 
octaves of the piano by moving your hand left and right. Ver. 1.0.1 has 
the beginnings of the code needed to accomplish that.

The GMI 1.0 executable and 1.0.1 source is online at 
<http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigchi/gmi.shtml> Get familiar with it; it's 
very easy to read! Let me know if you have any questions about how code 
works.

Over Spring Break, I will set our project up in CVS so everyone and 
anyone can easily work on it, and put some major efforts into squashing 
the bugs and implementing requested features.

During the rest of the semester, we will have some fun in hacking 
together a lefty version of the glove from the present version, get 
that working in GMI, and add other crazy stuff to the GMI like 3D sound.

Finally, there is a strong possibility that we'll work with the 
Psychology department to take the P5 Glove to another level by 
developing a software suite for people with Autism and/or other 
disabilities that affect fine motor skills. We'll first need to do some 
research on how effective such software might be. Anyone interested or 
know someone who might be interested in working on this with me?

Our next meeting is after Spring Break, Tuesday April 1st at 7:00 PM 
(no joke!).

Good luck on those midterms!
 - Josh

-- 
Joshua Benjamin - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Computer Science and Psychology - SigCHI Chair