Video-to-MIDI Converter for BeOS

Tebo Software announces the availability of a free demo version of Grabbo, a unique "video-to-MIDI converter" for the BeOS. Grabbo uses a realtime computer vision algorithm to generate MIDI commands that can be sent to external devices or to the BeOS internal MIDI synthesizer. Operating in realtime, Grabbo works with any video source, including broadcast television signals. Incoming video is analyzed and compared to stored video frames to compute MIDI values for output. Future versions of Grabbo will be able to send messages to any BeOS program, using BeOS inter-application messaging. Grabbo is the only BeOS software available for video control of MIDI devices.

The free beta version of Grabbo 0.9 is available today at the Tebo Software website, http://www.idiom.com/~tebo/, and will soon also be available at the BeWare site, http://www.be.com/beware/. The full commercial release is planned for Q4 1998, pricing to be determined. Check for final pricing and online ordering information at the Tebo Software website. Grabbo 0.9 will expire on August 1, 1998.

Grabbo analyzes images based on the orientation of objects, rather than position. Two different algorithms are currently provided: one outputs an index based on the closest matching image in a set of stored video frames. The other is a 3D interpolation scheme, which associates stored frames with points in 3D space, and computes a position between the points based on the similarity of the current video image to the keyframes. Although the current demo version controls a single 3D point, the full commercial release will support the interpolation of multiple 3D points, simultaneously; each coordinate of the interpolated positions will be assignable to a separate MIDI parameter. (The current demo release has these parameters hardcoded to specific parameters.) Using BeOS inter-application messages from Grabbo, the current 3D position is displayed using OpenGL by a companion application, 3dReceiver.

Bill Thibault, the creator of Grabbo, said, "Using Grabbo is like having your body connected to another place by an unseen, alien mechanism. Your body knows what to do with Grabbo, even if your mind is boggled by it."

Grabbo requires a BeOS-supported video capture card, which currently includes most cards using a Bt848 chip, such as the Hauppauge WinTV. Grabbo also requires a video display card which supports BeOS BDirectWindow, which allows 30fps display of incoming video. Currently, only Matrox Millenium and Mystique cards have BDirectWindow support. External MIDI hardware is not required, but is needed to realize Grabbo's full potential as a MIDI controller: Grabbo can the BeOS built-in synthesizer. On a fast cpu, Grabbo analyzes frames at 30fps. However, this version of Grabbo will only analyze at about 10fps on a Bebox-133. The size of the frames grabbed for analysis will be user-configurable in the commercial release, allowing any BeOS machine to achieve video-rate image analysis. BeOS was chosen for Grabbo due to its efficient handling of multimedia and its object-oriented API.

The BeOS (available from Be, Inc. at http://www.be.com ) is a new, modern, high-performance, media-optimized personal computer operating system that runs on Intel Pentium-based and PowerPC desktop computers. The BeOS incorporates pervasive multithreading, symmetric multiprocessing, protected memory, a 64-bit journaling file system, client-server based architecture and an object-oriented API. The BeOS delivers the performance required for multimedia applications, with unprecedented user responsiveness and enabling real-time manipulation and feedback capabilities in applications.

Tebo Software was founded by Bill Thibault in 1997. Dr. Thibault has a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and is a member of the faculty of California State University Hayward. His work with Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees appears in SIGGRAPH conference proceedings and numerous textbooks on Computer Graphics. More recently, his work has focused on realtime multimedia performance.