The Significance of the Z-axis

Cast your mind back to 1999, Britney Spears topped the charts, the Red Hot Chili Peppers declared Californication and a masked band named after a noose released their self-titled album, Slipknot.

Meanwhile on the other side of the music industry, something receiving less coverage by the media of its day was happening. The Japanese music hardware company, Korg, released the Kaoss Pad, a hybrid sampler and effects unit featuring a XY touch screen that gave the user the ability to manipulate audio samples through physical interaction with the surface of the screen.

Sound familiar?

It may not look like much by today's standards, but the Kaoss Pad represented a major innovation by presenting a touch screen product which the user could take home and use to play around with data, in this case sound. This gesture based controller preceded the smart phone by eight years and is still used by many modern musicians as a dynamic interface for producing and manipulating new sounds.

The Kaoss Pad, developed two further iterations, and a number of more compact spin-off products, the Kaossilator, and Mini-KP, all featuring further developments and advancements on the XY user interface. These products pre-empted the rise of the touch screen to ubiquity. Which in the wake of mobile computing has become integrated into a graphical user interface, that many of us now find sitting in our pockets.

So what am I saying?

Musicians have their hands on the technology first, when technology is developed, music technology spearheads. Years before the rest of us started tapping, rolling and drumming our fingers on the smart phone screen, musicians were mashing sounds around, with these gestures, using an earlier form of the same technology.

So having finally concluded the global search for smart materials, this will allow us to produce a sensitive tactile surface, a user interface that responds not to the the familiar x and y axes, but the Z-axis, that is to say, the application of pressure. We are riding the crest of the wave, and it is only a matter of time before it breaks and the z-axis becomes a standard feature in all sorts of technological products.