Physical Remote Controler for Vj dancing
Concept Description
In the nightclubs the significance and the quality of the Vjs are increasing every day, and it is becoming a respected job due the maturing of the professionals involved, more or less as happened with the Djs in the 80’s. But, at the same time, more and more the public misses the interaction or even the show feature that can be found in concerts and band exhibitions. This model of nightclubs with DJ-pickups, VJ-laptop/mixer and a big screen with images that caught all the visual attention looks like that there is no humans using their skills to do things in real-time.
And, looking from the other side, it is also frustrating to the VJ to be attached to a computer, in a constrained and introspective position, and at the same time try to generate a expansive, exciting and extroversive video output. Usually the desire is to go down from the stage and join the people at the dance floor and still keep control over the video, but from a different point of view. Or even try to get the energy from the dancing people sharing with them some simple control over the real-time inputs, just getting info from the dance movements.
The idea here is to create a tool for the Vjs control remotely, without wires, and with more natural gestures (than keyboard, mouse and sliders) the video mixing. The secondary feature is to allow people use this same tool in a kind of simpler “user mode” to play with the video in the big screen, without need of previous learning (they will learn “on the fly” by the visual feedbacks).
The Wrist Brace VJ has basically three elements in the communication process. There are the pin-buttons, the wrist brace and the base box that connects to the computer. The pin-buttons are RF-Id tags that are read-only and have a unique number that will be assigned a specific command. In the wrist brace, the ECM110-02 RF-Id reader will get this number and send to the PIC16F628 chip that will send this information to the RF transceiver. The PIC will be also managing and sending out the inputs from the accelerometer ADXL210E that is sensible to vertical and horizontal movements, the 2 axes defined by your stand up body and the arms opened. This data sent by the wrist brace transceiver arrives in another transceiver in the base box. At the box, this information will be processed by software in a PIC 16F876, interpreted and converted to Midi signals. Then the Midi signals go to the USB of the computer and are recognized by the software that the VJ uses. He can use the suggested assignment of the commands or can configure it according to personal style.