If you’d rather have a play on many different kinds of instruments instead of paying lots of money for one, Ototo lets you use a pipe as a saxophone, a bench as a keyboard, a piece of cardboard as a guitar, and so on. By attaching up to 12 touch-sensitive inputs to whatever object you want, you can turn it into literally any instrument that exists in the virtual world.
Ototo picks up signals from anything conductive that you plug it into — and if the object you want to use doesn’t have anything conductive on it, you can simply glue, tack, or clip something onto it to make it work. From there, you can alter its sound using the separate sensors which affect pitch, texture, and volume. These sensors can be activated by light and breath as well as touch.
After covering Ototo in November last year, at which point they were accepting pre-orders independently, it seems they’ve decided a Kickstarter is the best way to go. Happily, they’ve already met their goal — and if you want to get in on that Kickstarter deal, there’s only 18 hours left. The packs that include an actual Ototo start at just under $85 AUD.
Software and firmware will be open source upon release, and there are already plenty of examples of what can be done with an Ototo. But one gets the sense from developer interviews that they’d rather not put out too many of their own ideas, so as not to taint the blank canvas. They’d rather leave it open and see what other people can come up with.