I threw together a simple patch-style synth to play with the Web MIDI APIs and React Flow. It’s an early experiment and part of my personal “try things and learn” site.
There's an app called Novel Effect that's free that adds sound effects and music when you read a physical book out loud. It's limited to a list a of books and poems, so it won't just work with any book, but it's still a fun tech to demo. It's popular with teachers already, and has a pretty low bar when it comes to ease of use. And it's something they can do on their own too.
I really like this. My only issue is that the prototype ignores single finger, which to me feels like it should be the most important control. The other issue with number of fingers based gestures is, well, people who are missing fingers. I also think using both the X & Y position could be really useful. Why not tune the radio by dragging up and down and adjust the volume by move right and left, or other combined gestures?
They were late to the internet party all around. But when they did decide to get on the ball they put a lot of the leaders out of business by finally putting the TCP/IP stack in the OS. Which really was a good idea in the early 90s.
Thanks! Hopefully sooner than later. I got all fired up trying to search for a car part, an area of the web I mostly avoid and was surprised to find so many sites still getting ranked highly for doing this.