Future Work

Currently, GNU/Linux is the preferred platform for building instruments for Pd because of HID and force feedback objects only run on GNU/Linux. But both Windows and MacOS X have solid support for HIDs and force feedback, so the Pd objects just need to be written. Ideally, these objects would be written to use the same interface as existing objects so that instrument patches would could easily be used on as many platforms as possible. Since my current platform of choice is MacOS X, I plan on writing a set of cross-platform objects to support HIDs and haptic gaming devices and incorporate them into a HID toolkit for Pd.

In terms of mapping , there is a lot of potential in using physical modeling instead of simple averaging methods for processing the data from the input devices. The pmpd[Henry(2004)] library provides the basic building blocks for creating physical models within Pd.

Now that video and graphics have become a standard part of Pd, it seems that the time is ripe for the exploration of physical instruments for controlling visual synthesis. Most current video editing setups are physical interfaces, but are mostly keyboard/mouse based and not tailored for capturing gestures in order to synthesize visuals.