Altbox.

The Altbox is a reprogrammable guitar pedal designed for the beginner, hobbyist or intermediate guitarist that boasts an intuitive and simple interface working seamlessly with a community based app to create a holistic user experience to enable creativity, sharing, identity and freedom. 

The Altbox is primarily aimed towards beginners and intermediates. As opposed to conventional guitar pedals, the customer is not bound by the limitations and restrictions of a single purpose pedal. Arguably, even multi-effects pedals are bound by the parameters set within the design stages. This means that the individual has the freedom to create their own sound and learn what they want without the risk of dissatisfaction and lack of freedom that a single-effect pedal may bring.

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How?

When the customer buys the Altbox, they download the app to their smartphone and pair it to their pedal. From this point they craft their own effects from an extensive sound bank to assign it to one of seven preset banks on the pedal which can update this live from their phone as they play. Osseia encourages sharing as sounds can be transferred across pedals thanks to the NFC tag inside the Altbox, or via the app into the community. The customer can decide upon a name to be printed onto the pedal to aid differentiation and create a more personalized product, after all, Osseia strongly supports and inspires individuality.
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Creativity & Freedom

A strong theme of this product is to encourage creativity. Since the pedal can be reprogrammed and effects can be created from a collection of sounds, the individual is encouraged to discover the sound they want

Share

Sharing is encouraged as sounds can be transferred across pedals thanks to the NFC tag inside the Altbox, or via the app into the community. The pedals are pressed together at the front by the plastic NFC logo, of which the space is milled out of the white aluminium to allow the connection to penetrate the wall.

These features encourage participation. As effects can be shared to the app, a sense of community will form; as effects can be physically transferred, friends can easily trade sounds.

Individual

Music is all about personality, personal taste and and identity. A name can be chosen to be printed onto the pedal to aid differentiation between multiple products and create a more personalized product, after all, the Altbox strongly encourages and enables individuality.

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Prototype Photos

The App

The home screen allow the user to discover sounds, along with having a selection of the most popular effects.

To open the navigation panel, the user presses the icon at the top left (home icon), which opens the screen to the right. 

Selecting the home icon reveals the navigation panel. This allows the user to select (from left to right): home, favourites (effects), presets (to apply to the pedal), and profile.

Sliding the finger over one of the four icons will bring up a translucent overlay with the page name appearing in the center.

This page is the pedal interface. The pedal is paired via bluetooth (and NFC). From here the desires sounds are chosen to create an effect. There is an 'i' icon by the sound to explain it and various features at the bottom such as sharing, undoing the last change and setting the preset LED colour.

If the user holds their finger over the 7 blue circles near the top of the previous image, this interface appears which mimics the physical pedal's semantics. This interface allows the user to select the preset by dragging their finger over the correct circle, corresponding with the pedal itself.

Altbox Video