Play'Round is a touch-screen based interactive virtual record player that allows you, the users, to mix your own sounds. The table is triggered by the touch of a finger that acts as the needle, which means, wherever you touch on the disk, depending on the distance to the center, a track will start to play at that location. The visual output will be a psychedelic wave, emerging from where your finger is on the table, as it plays the sounds on that track. The different needle points created by the user will remain present until the track stops running, or until the user touches it to make it disappear.

Background
Projects we saw and created in our Spatial Media class, responsive environments and touch-screen based interactive pieces that we played with or seen videos of.

Audience
Ideally, we envision this to be in the center of a dark room with a surround sound system. It could be installed in an interactive-arts festival, electronic arts festival, a gallery, a museum, a music store or a concert venue. Our intended audience is music lovers, vinyl enthusiasts and anyone who likes interactive tables and sound installations.

User Scenario
The viewer walks up the table with a spinning LP on it. There are no graphics at first. The only sound there is that indicates the table is a interactive sound piece is the warm fuzzy crackling sound of an old vinyl record player.
Once the viewer puts his/her hand on the table, a visual queue will appear on the table to let the viewer know that the table is interactive.
Once the viewer keeps his/her finger on one of the 10 tracks for 5 seconds, the sample from that track will start playing, along with the wave graphics.
The viewer/s are open to explore the interface as they create their own mixes.



Implementation
The hardware setup of the project consists of over-projection, over-sensing, computer vision, computer graphics and sounds, all programmed in openFrameworks. We will have round table covered with black plastic material to give the viewer the sense of a real vinyl when they touch the surface.

Conclusion
We learned that simple ideas that are well communicated visually and conceptually are very powerful. They end up very playful pieces. When we were working on the prototype, we got a lot of enthusiastic interest from passerbys even though our sensing wasn't incorporated to the piece yet.

There are future implementations that we want to explore: Add multiple disks that can be changed with a double touch in the center. Each new disk will have different sounds and animations.