Feedback Design in Augmented Musical Instruments: A Case Study with an AR Drum Kit

In this paper, we introduce the AR (augmented reality) drum kit that supports a self-training process with visual guidance and feedback. While musical instruments play requires repetitive practice, the learner often easily loses interest and gives up making effort on learning. Therefore, our system was designed to keep intrinsic motivation by offering playful features, such as a game-like user interface and a variety of tasks with different difficulty levels. Moreover, as a drum kit offers distributed interaction points (i.e., drum pads), visual guidance information needs to consider that the player´s attention would be fragmented during a performance. Available cognitive resources are limited for each task in such a multitasking environment, thus the information should be simple and lightweight in order not to require explicit attention. We developed several presentation styles, such as direct projection to drum pads and ambient projection on the wall, to evaluate the usability of the system. We also report preliminary user study results to identify further design issues for the future work.