air guitar

["samba -" <sambacomet@hotmail.com>]

This is from the April issue of New Scientist, but there is no URL link 
yet.






AIR GUITAR
Will it appeal to teenage boys or forty-something-year-old men?
Sharper Image of San Francisco is patenting a games controller that
allows you to produce real music while playing air guitar. The
system beams out infrared light pulses and measures the time taken
for them to be reflected back from, say, the hand of someone
strumming Paradise City by Guns N' Roses. The makers say the system
is accurate enough to track each hand and convert that action into
music (US patent application 2005/0057495). It can also be used to
create a virtual keyboard, à la Jean Michel Jarre, or allow gamers
to pretend they are Marvelous Marvin Hagler and shadow-box a virtual
opponent.