🔔 The Morph is discontinued. Click to read the announcement. 🔔 The Morph is discontinued. Click to read the announcement.

News

The Morph Video Editing Overlay

The Sensel Morph Video Editing Overlay puts the power of editing at your fingertips.

Video has become ubiquitous in people's lives. Not only can we watch anything anywhere, we are making videos and sharing things as they happen. Video editing is the tool to help people understand those events and reflect on them. What the written word is to everyday language, video editing is to the world we see and hear as we move through it.

To many, video editing means shooting a video, trimming off some of the start and end, and uploading it to Instagram to share a moment with friends and colleagues. Others may encounter it from the condensed memory of weddings, bat mitzvahs, a birthday divisible by 10, or a quinciñera, produced by the videographer they hired to make sense of the blur of activity, family, and friends.

Some have a more dedicated involvement, taking the dozens of snippets from a vacation, adding some music, and reliving a unique time of life.

Then there are the professionals. The film makers, the television editors, the videographers, the documentarians, who sort through hours of footage and create stories from productions, ideas, events, and scripts.

Apple's iMovie has made editing vastly more accessible, and allowed people to add a professional polish. But iMovie is just the beginning. With the Morph Video Overlay, you can now access professional tools more efficiently and with less learning curve than ever before.

The Video Editing Overlay puts all the important functions in a legible and sensible layout, making it easier to find and understand all the functions in Adobe Premiere. Learning keyboard shortcuts is a sure way to speed things up, but their mysterious mappings and awkward finger positions can often be a barrier to learning them when you are just trying to get something done.

For those already in the know, and working with a professional editor such as Adobe Premiere Pro, adapting the intuitive and comfortable hardware of the Morph Video Overlay will help speed up workflow and get things done. The portability of the Morph means you can cut footage on location with little more than a backpack full of equipment, but still having professional access and speed.

We produced this overview video to demonstrate how easy it is to put together video and the essential functions you can access with the Video Editing Overlay.

For the extra curious, if you want to see the finished product, watch the below video. We gathered up a fairly random collection of free videos from stock footage site Pexels, then pieced together with some original music to something with a bit more meaning and feeling. If we can do this with some random clips, imagine what you could do with the pieces of life you've collected?

Introducing the Sensel Morph: Creativity Anywhere

Introducing the Sensel Morph: Creativity Anywhere

We're extremely proud that we shipped all the Morphs to the original Kickstarter backers. But what about the rest of the world who didn't know such a thing existed or was possible?

Now we can all introduce the Morph to them, as we've redesigned our website with an integrated shop, and ramped up our inventory and production. Now, anyone can order a Morph and experience the next-level interface for whatever creative drive they entertain.

Because we want to spread the word far and wide, we made a crazy video. We teamed up with some extremely talented Los Angeles residents:  the underground production duo Epikker (Henry Strange and Suniel Fox), dancers Dishon Hall and Brian Edwards, and filmmaker Steve Elkins. We setup in the Happier Camper facility, where they make some of the most unique camping trailers to ever hit the streets (and deserts, mountains, and coasts!).

Check out the results where Suniel and Henry perform a live version of their remix track "Everyday." We think it proves the point of the Sensel Morph: you can be creative anywhere. 

Control a Robotic Arm With Force-Sensitive Hand Gestures

Control a Robotic Arm With Force-Sensitive Hand Gestures
Awesome piece by Atmel on Ray Kampmeier using Sensel technology to control a robot arm!

  Atmel | Bits & Pieces


Maker manipulates a robotic arm with pressure-based hand gestures on the Sensel Morph. 

Ray Kampmeier recently finished a project that enabled him to manipulate a robotic arm using force-sensitive, five-finger hand gestures. To accomplish this, the self-proclaimed hobbyist employed a MeArm, an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), four servo motors, and a servo shield to control the mechanism.

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Sensel’s soon-to-be-released touch interface — the Morph — is used to command the robotic arm in four different ways: force down, rotation, pinch and forward/backward. For example, placing five contact points down and twisting the wrist will rotate the base, applying pressure on four fingertips will raise and lower the arm, while moving along its XY axes will extend and retract it. What’s more, Kampmeier reveals that pinching all five fingertips together on the center of the touchpad will cause its attached claw to close.

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“Without the force sensitivity, I don’t think it would have been as magical of an experience for me to control the robot arm. It would have been a pretty binary detection of force — you have applied force and you have not-applied force. In this device, there’s a very robust range of force sensing. That level of control, and seeing that in the robot arm, gives a magical sense of feedback,” the Maker adds.

Intrigued? Kampmeier has made all of the code available on GitHub. While this may be a simple example of Sensel’s latest technology, it’ll certainly be exciting to see what the future has in store once the Maker community gets their hands on the interface. They won’t have to wait too long, as the Bay Area startup is planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign at the end of August. Until then, watch the project in action below!