The Essentials

[VIDEO] Learn How Armin Van Buuren Uses MYO Armbands to Control Lights and LED Screens on Stage

!!! See Thalmic Labs’ MYO Armbands on Amazon !!!

Sander Ter Braak: “Armin is always really interested in new technology. And we are constantly exploring for ways for him to interact with his crowd. We had this idea of tracking Armin’s movement and integrating it in, for example, things like video or lights. And, there are multiple technologies on the market that would allow us to do that. But the problem with these things is that they all work on infrared light, so we can set up a test here, but the moment you take it stage it doesn’t work at all because the only thing that camera sees is white light. So, we found out on the internet about this company and they produce this armband which works on actual sensors and these sensors transfer the data by Bluetooth. So we Don’t have any interference of lights or other things.
The first test we did was at State of Trance. We gave one of these armbands to Armin and asked him to wear one during his set to see if we could record some data of Armin. With this data we were able to make a playback in our office, try new things over and over again, and explore what the possibilies are.
After some testing, we saw that we were able to differentiate different different poses of Armin and we decided go ahead and implement it in Ushuaia where Armin was a resident for the whole summer season. That way we had a real good controlled environment to explore possibilities of the medium.

Armin Van Buuren: “In Ushuaia, we tried something new for the people that watched some of the footage from Ushuaia gig: I am wearing bracelets called MYO. MYO basically records your movements. We had to program it every week, and every week we wound add a new functionality.”

Sander Ter Braak: “One of the effects is that lights on the stage will move accordingly to his position. He is also able to point at people in the crowd for instance. He is able to control the animations and LED screens. The next step from here is to see if we are able to implement it in a different environment. We are going to see how that works out and what happens after that is still a secret.”

!!! See Thalmic Labs’ MYO Armbands on Amazon !!!