Glinster Hand-Tracking MPE Instrument For Vision Pro And iOS

Geert Bevin has a CV that give him a lot of credibility in the filed of expressive controllers: he worked on the Eigenharp, created GECO, helped create the LinnStrument with Roger Linn, is one of the authors of the MPE specification, and built the Moog apps for Apple platforms. - see our interview with him here: https://youtu.be/2nxTsxUKoS8

 His new release, Glinster, picks up the thread he started with GECO - hand movement turned into MIDI - but without the Leap Motion sensor. On Apple Vision Pro the hands are tracked directly. On iPhone and iPad, the glass you already own becomes the playing surface.

The instrument measures your hand rather than asking you to adapt to a fixed layout. On iPhone and iPad you rest your playing hand flat, then reach up, and Glinster records how far apart your fingers sit, how far you reach and how they arch. After that the notes appear beside your thumb wherever you put it, with the rows curved to match your hand and the grid following it as you play. Left-handed players are detected from the way they rest their hand, and a guided tour checks each gesture as you perform it before moving on.

On Vision Pro nothing is held at all. Thumb to fingertip plays a note and releasing stops it, while turning the palm reaches the rest of the scale. The first note places an expression sphere around the hand, and your position inside it sets volume and brightness.

The gesture set is short:

• Raise your hand - louder
• Push your hand forward - brighter
• Move sideways - pitch bend
• Pinch or turn the other hand - shift by a semitone, a whole tone or an octave

A ruler floats in front of you showing which note is sounding, how far it is bent and the angle of each palm. The advice is to watch the ruler rather than your hands. Pause, and your last notes hang above it as a small constellation before fading.

On the touchscreen versions, sliding a playing finger sideways bends its pitch, up and down changes brightness, and the thumb handles volume. Every finger plays its own note. On iPad extra rows continue the scale above your hand, and there is room for both hands.

Output is MPE, so each finger's note leaves on its own MIDI channel with its own pitch, brightness and volume for a polyphonic synth to follow. Glinster also has its own sounds - five presets, sixteen scales, twelve roots - and runs as an AUv3 instrument or as a MIDI generator inside a DAW, over Bluetooth MIDI, a virtual MIDI port or a network MIDI session with a Mac. Lossless takes can be recorded and played back with the instrument still live.

Glinster is out now, released November 3 2026, at $9.99 as a single App Store purchase covering Apple Vision Pro (visionOS 26), iPhone (iOS 18) and iPad (iPadOS 18), with the AUv3 plugins included. There is no free tier and nothing to unlock.

More Info: https://uwyn.com/glinster/

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