Shred Air With Theremin Hero

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBhOB7CfUoY%5D

Remember those Ebay auctions of air guitars going for several thousands of dollars? We don’t either, but Theremin Hero (more info in the YouTube description) is about as legit as you can get to actually rocking on nothing but air.

Much like using a theremin to control Mario, the vertical antenna acts as the fret board while the horizontal one detects strumming. Combine the output of the theremin with some custom software (yet to be released) and Guitar Hero and you have Theremin Hero Air Guitar.

[via Bob’s House of Video Games]

16 thoughts on “Shred Air With Theremin Hero

  1. Strangely, waving my hands about in mid air seems less ridiculous than ‘playing’ a plastic toy guitar controller.

    The video itself was pretty good too (except for the audio clipping).

  2. @Ben, um it looks like they’re playing a normal theremin (which they are), and to me, that’s a LOT less ridiculous than playing an air guitar…

    But also it would be awesome to see KINECT do an air guitar hero.

    @supershwa it’s probably more accurate in some ways, and less accurate in others, there are always trade offs, the way the instrument works is that it measures capacitance using the human to complete the circuit to ground (IIUC), and somehow this capacitance drives oscilliators to make varying frequencies and noises.

    It looks like from there his interface measures the output of the theremin and maps it to something the video game can use.

  3. This is just brilliant — nothing positive I can say that hasn’t already been so.

    Am I, however, the only one annoyed by the fact that pitch is inverted? Sure, it matches up with the screen better, but the closer you are to the frequency rod, the higher the note sounded by the instrument. I suppose that could only be fixed by flipping the hardware, or unorthodoxly placing the pitch hand to the left of the rod.

    I hope they’ll make shaking your hand sligthly apply whammy in a future version; that’d feel hella rad. It plays an important part in gameplay too, so without it you couldn’t achieve optimal scores. I’d hate to show up at a tournament with this an get disqulified for that.

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