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• Extrusion Confusion

  Hunter Irving • 10/06/2018 at 04:41 • 0 comments

  On my first waveform card video, a viewer asked if the 3D-printed cards explicitly had to be white to be recognized by the Switch's infrared camera. To me, this seemed like a definite "no" - the camera was just detecting the card's shape, and it couldn't even see light in the visible spectrum.

  To answer their question (and to spice things up a little bit - those white cards were starting to look a little drab), I decided to print the cards for this second video using red and yellow filament.
  

  
  

  ...but when I looked at the cards through the Switch's infrared camera, I noticed that they were letting a lot of light through, and images looked a little "muddier" as a result.

  Here's one of the original white cards seen through a yellow card.

  In the end, I decided to go with white filament for these 9 new cards, which seemed to produce marginally crisper reads.

  Luckily, I had just barely enough white filament left on hand to make it happen.
  

  
  

• An Original Song (That You Can Download For Free)

  Hunter Irving • 10/06/2018 at 04:17 • 0 comments

  Here it is, the hit single that's rising in international pop charts, Hunter Irving's "I Like You".
  

  Created entirely using Nintendo LABO and custom 3D-printed Waveform Cards.

  
  

  https://soundcloud.com/hunter-irving/i-like-you
  

• On Speech Synthesis Using Composited Periodic Waveforms

  Hunter Irving • 10/06/2018 at 04:15 • 0 comments

  Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds into my second LABO video, I hit on a popular question that many viewers seemed to have:

  
  Would it be possible to create a Waveform Card that approximates human speech?
  

  To begin with, this felt like a solid "no" to me - if you've ever watched human speech on an oscilloscope, you know that the waveform produced is far from periodic.

  
  However, I noticed that the five vowel sounds ("Ah", "Ee", "Eh", "Ooh", and "Oh") did produce roughly periodic waveforms when spoken alone.
  

  I made 5 more cards using samples from FL Studio's built-in speech synthesizer, and the results (even when digitized by the Switch's low-resolution infrared camera) were fairly impressive.

  In a fervent, last-ditch effort to make speech synthesis on Nintendo LABO ToyCon Piano happen, I spent a while layering component vowel sounds in an attempt to approximate human speech.
  
  The results weren't perfect, but with subtitles, I think you can hear what I was going for.

  ("I Like You" breaks down to "Ah-Ee Ah-Ee-(staccato "Eh" to make a "K" sound) "Eh"-(that blends into)-"Ooh")
  
  I tried.
  
  - Hunter
  
  

• On the Joys of Open-Source

  Hunter Irving • 10/06/2018 at 03:44 • 0 comments

  When I made the files for this project available on hunterirving.com, I had no idea so many people would find them useful.

  I guessed that most who downloaded them would use the provided STL files to make 3D-printed cards as I had, but it seems that the SVGs I included turned out to be much more popular:
  

  Reddit user compacta_d used a Kongsberg cutting table to cut these cards from E flute corrugated.

  Reddit user AchillesPDX used a hobby laser cutter to cut these cards from cardboard.

  Bigtime YouTube channel Melody Geeks even used a few of them in some of their LABO cover videos.
  
  
  Knowing that other people were able to gain something from my project is a pretty great feeling.
  
  Look forward to more open-source projects from me in the future!
  
  - Hunter
  

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