This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.
The functionality we envision helps ad-hoc groups of people who find themselves in the same location/venue/party to compare their music tastes and see where the overlaps and where the holes are. The table would be a turn-taking jukebox with tangible interactions and nice visuals for all users and spectators.
Easier said than done, of course. We spent a great part of the week and most of the weekend hacking, building, eating, drinking coffee, staying up to the wee hours, literally stabbing ourselves with scalpels, cursing a great deal and drinking whisky to get the thing together, when finally on Sunday in the last hour before the presentation we managed to integrate everything to the level that we could shoot a demo video.
Pictures of the proces and demo videos below:
What we built was just an initial step on the way to the jukebox I described above, but it seemed to look promising enough to net us the first prize from last.fm at Music Hackday for which we were very happy.
We like to thank last.fm, the organizers and the participants of Music Hackday. It was a great event and for us it was a great occasion to finally get this project started.
We will develop the table further and build out the functionality we had envisioned to make it a real locus for social music discovery. It should be hanging in one of our studios soon, so get in touch and visit if you want to try it out.
Nice writeup! I agree that the hack day was merely an excuse to start this experimential project. Can’t wait to spend more time with the rig.
Congrats! Super cool 🙂