For Eboman we developed the SenSorSuit. The SenSorSuit is a wire-less body motion tracking suit to control audio-visual software. This suit consists of flex sensors on knees, waist, elbow, shoulders and wrists and touch sensitive buttons on the arms and gloves and shoe. This is a great interface for live performances and it has been used for many projects, as you can see on the Eboman website.
Wireless body motion tracking
The suit is wireless, very light and easy to calibrate, which makes it easy to use in any circumstance.
Flex sensors
To track the motion of the joints, flex sensors are used. These sensors are very reliable and easy to maintain, but very sensitive and generate a lot of data, even with the slightest bending. To cope with this, we created noise filtering software to make the data useful
The sensor cables for each arm are integrated, with sensors positioned at the armpits, elbows, and wrists. Additionally, each arm features four buttons and a dedicated calibration button for the suit.
The sensor cable for the legs has sensors for the waist (upper legs), knees and feet attached. The sensors are kept in place with braces on the elbows and knees and elastic bands attached to a spandex suit for the armpits and wrists.
Touch sensor
Touch sensitive sensors mounted to gloves are used to send MIDI triggers and velocity data. These sensors are also mounted to soles to send foot pressure.
Midi converter
A small, custom build computer converts the sensor data to MIDI. The computer cleans the data and maps the raw data to specific MIDI ranges. The computer is calibrated with a button on the arms, to make sure the SenSorSuit always outputs the same data.
Software
We developed custom, very advanced, interactive video software to use with the suit, called SenSei. SenSei turns Ableton Live (popular music software) into an audio-visual instrument. It is the final prototype before the development of EboSuite. SenSei consists of a set of ‘Max for Live’ plug-ins to control the SenSei application from within Ableton Live and a set of editors to edit different aspects of a SenSei project. It has many innovative creative possiblities, like its real-time motion graphics and 3D video mix capabilities, its audio-visual effect and visual music capabilities and live video sampling capabilities.
Examples
The SenSorSuit has been used for many performances. Eboman had a lot of success with the live video sampling shows. In these shows he used live recordings of the audience to create tracks live. The SenSorSuit made it easy to approach the crowd and interact with them, while still being able to adjust the live recorded samples to make them fit into the track and play and improvise.