DAWING, NOT WAVING
By Graeme Hague
3 December 2013
Possibly the R&D department at Steinberg has been putting a little too much sugar in the coffee. After years of telling us that dedicated DAW controllers provide a vastly superior, tactile experience over just the humble mouse and keyboard, Steinberg has developed a system where you don’t have to touch anything at all. IC Air for Cubase (it only works with Cubase) recognises specific hand gestures which you can map to any parameter. These are ‘seen’ with either the Leap Motion device, which is a USB motion detector you place within reach, or a camera mounted on your video monitor. It’s a choice – you wouldn’t install both. First impressions are it’s clever, but far from actually improving you DAW workflow. The gestures need to be specific and deliberate, and thus are a very slow interface compared to a hotkey or mouse click. The library of gestures is still limited – at least there’s no risk of inadvertently wiping your hard drive when you wipe your nose. IC Air is probably more of a nicely-resolved ‘proof of concept’ at the moment. There’s not a lot of precision in evidence. But smarter brains than ours will undoubtedly already be seeing applications.
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