Invention

AIR GUITAR

Will it appeal to teenage boys or forty-something-year-old men? Sharper Image of San Francisco is patenting a games controller that allows you to produce real music while playing air guitar. The system beams out infrared light pulses and measures the time taken for them to be reflected back from, say, the hand of someone strumming Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses. The makers say the system is accurate enough to track each hand and convert that action into music (US patent application 2005/0057495). It can also be used to create a virtual keyboard, à la Jean Michel Jarre, or allow gamers to pretend…