Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

I find it a bit suspicious that this exact hand waving data could be used to solve Google's latest reCAPTCHA: https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-ve...

I’m going to get pwned one of these days, considering my threshold for giving a random website access to my webcam is apparently mild curiosity and entertainment for 30s.

Very impressed by the responsiveness of this. But I gotta say, it's much more fun to play a physical theremin, which has slightly different controls (two antennae, one controlling volume and the other pitch).

https://www.gaudi.ch/OpenTheremin/ will run with an Arduino and it's very satisfying to get better at controlling.

Funny I built a very similar app just a few days ago. Cool idea!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363233

https://termenvox.vercel.app/

https://github.com/TimMikeladze/termenvox

If my Jack Russell is in the right mood, I can make him growl by bringing my hands up as if to stroke him.

I call this the Therrieremin.

Since a physical theremin is played by non-contact gestures and motions, perhaps your creation might be more aptly termed a "Virtual theremin."

Bah, I got part way through making this as an iPhone app and this person beat me to it :P

Seriously though: nicely done, UX here is better than what I came up with.

Funny, I guess this idea is in the air (har har).

I've made a couple things along these lines over the past year. One is a fun, Halloween-themed toy:

https://blog.cochlea.xyz/theremin.html

The other is a (slightly) more serious exploration of multivariate time signals as a control signal for an instrument. In the latter case, the instrument is learned/inferred from a segment of input audio:

https://blog.cochlea.xyz/resonancemodel.html

This is a really neat idea! Like others here, I'm not a huge fan of the hyper-dense and dripping-with-ai UI, though.

Really cool. I remember one local musician here in Lithuania used a theremin like 20 years ago and i was amazed at the interactivity and the alien sound of it. Now sitting in front of my computer doing the same that many years later brings memories back!

I made one of these recently! Total vibe-code, but exactly the sort of thing that I'd never get around to without.

Plugged it into Sonic Pi, wired it up to play samples on gestures. Got a nice installation brewing at some point.

Funny I put one of these on my personal site awhile ago. https://www.zchry.org/

I don't think it works as well as this one.

This is extremely cool. I activated the camera and it recognized the position of my hands and I was able to play it as shown in the instructions. It's very fun.

I often think adding minority report style gestures to a laptop would be more useful than a touchscreen, maybe that’s just me…

Really missed the opportunity for "Airemin".

I love this, but for some reason I can't find any way to turn the camera on/it only works with the mouse. Awesome toy though.