Scientists from the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) have improved the performance of a pair of musical Wi-Fi gloves worn by popstar Imogen Heap.
Used during Heap’s experimental live music performances to control both music and visuals with a series of gestures, the so-called Mi.Mu glove system must be robust enough to cope with interference from hundreds of Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones in the audience.
To improve the gloves’ connectivity, the researchers, together with U.S. networking firm Broadcom, modified a Wi-Fi access point to allow the use of high-gain directional antennas. The team also showed how the link can be improved by modifying a number of Medium Access Control (MAC) parameters in their paper, “Making the Most of Wi-Fi: Optimisations for Robust Wireless Live Music Performance,” which was presented earlier this month at the 14th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2014) in London.
The project was led by Andrew Nix, professor of wireless communication systems and head of the department of electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Bristol; Thomas Mitchell, a computer scientist, researcher and computer music lecturer at the University of the West of England and Seb Madgwick, the director of x-io Technologies. Simon Rankine, a MEng Electronics and Communications Engineering undergraduate student, assisted with the project. A blog by Rankine about the Wi-Fi gloves project is available here.
“We have a world-leading Wi-Fi research group at Bristol and this project really caught our imagination. With help from Broadcom, Simon was able to modify a standard access point to ruggedize the link to and from Imogen’s Wi-Fi gloves. It’s fantastic to see one of our undergraduate students contributing so strongly to our research output,” Andrew Nix, professor of wireless communication systems and head of the department of electrical and electronic engineering, said.
The researchers plan to take their work a step further by evaluating the complete system—the network infrastructure and antenna—in a series of ‘real-world’ performance scenarios. In particular, the team is interested in examining the use of a Wi-Fi interface device known as x-OSC to help enable a collaborative live performance using a wireless sensor network.