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…It almost feels like christmas, handing in the final report of Sputnik today. It was a lot of work over the last few months, but in the end, I feel like every hour spent (over 300, that is) was worth spending. I would also like to thank my süpervisor Esben Warming Pedersen (here, and there), whithou whom this project would not be what it is now. He was a great help during the process and always pointed me in the right direction. Great thanks also to the testers I tormented in the user study.

So.., for the uninitiated: What is Sputnik? To put it in fancy terms: Sputnik is a 3D/audio/visual/music project that allows its user to interact and manipulate virtual objects in a 3D scene to create and manipulate sounds. Pretty nifty, right? But it does not stop there. Sputniks uses the Wiimote and outputs plain MIDI messages that can be used with vitually any other music program.

The attached video gives a brief, no thrills overview about what it does. The arc of light is controlled via a Wiimote and the camera can be moved with the Nunchuck controller. A full description, plus the results and discussion of the user study can be found in the project report (https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/at.simonwallner.public/sputnik_report.pdf).

Further development is yet unclear, and depends on weather I can find some time to work on it. However, Sputnik is licensed under the permissive MIT open source license, and all source code can be found here (https://github.com/SimonWallner/sputnik). It currently only supports OS X, but porting it to other platforms should only be a matter of chaning the Wiimote lib and possibly also the MIDI lib (cant remember right now). My own code uses -Wall, -Wextra, -Werror and -pedantic and builds with CMake, so porting it shouldn’t pose much of a problem.

The next logical steps in the development would be some sort of scripting support and porting, in order to make it accessible for non programmers.

If you have any questions around Sputnik or its source, I’ll be happy to answer them.