Awhile back I wrote about music technology being one of the areas pushing new user interface\interaction technologies, such as the Kinect, and the Wii before it.

Well, I’m a little behind on this one, but this video preview of AudioGL is another example, this time in terms of 3D UI.

Apart from the opening credits, the first section is a pretty standard, albeit slick, 2D interface along the lines of other modular DAWs or instruments. However, around the 8 minute mark he suddenly zooms back from that 2D interface to show all the modules connected on a plane, with the automation tracks flowing through the property on the 2D interface and away to a vanishing point in the distance. Shades of Tron meet Dance Dance Revolution.

I have no idea if this interface would be useful or usable for composition, it appears it may be more oriented towards performance, but I’m impressed with the leap of imagination taken to render automation on the “z axis”, and I’m now wondering about the possibilities for generating 3D datapoints dynamically and the applicability to other domains.