The concept of visualhandpan.com is to provide a new creative instrument for the Handpan community. It can be used to explore your own Handpan play and see how it can offer new interactions to it. It can also be used to enhance your Handpan play with a new visual expression for yourself and your audience. And it can be your partner to create a truly new stage performance that takes your audience to a new perception of your music.
How it works
When you play Handpan your hands are performing a dance on the instrument to create your music. When you use a webcam that can record your hand movements visualhandpan software can recognize your hands in the camera livestream and translate it into a 3D space. In that space your hand movements are represented as data points that can be used in various ways. For example, your hand positions can change the positions of other 3D objects or their colors.
A second instrument
As your hands play your Handpan in the real world, your hands simultaneously play another instrument in the virtual world. Like your Handpan you likely want to explore that new instrument first and learn how you can control it. We call this practice mode and you don’t need much technical equipment to get started. When you bring the appearance of that virtual world back to the real world on a screen or a projector you can close the feedback loop and add it to your music as a theatre stage that tells a visual story or a light show that emphasizes your expressions. We call this performance mode and likely you want to use a slightly more complicated setup with a projector and additional cable setup or lighting to create your stage.