Reevo at Ektopia has this story about Livid Instruments' video-playing guitar, which seems to take the 'keytar' concept onto a whole new level. It's a good week for 'video instruments', with two mainstream offerings at MusicMesse: Korg's MPC-inspired Kaptivator and Edirol's CG-8 Visual Synthesizer.
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
The Viditar is actually the instrument for the band SINCH played by Jack Smith, you can read about it on the apple site http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2002/11/sinch/
peter kirn said "And weirdly, I don't think they process video directly -- I think they use OS X software."
You're right Peter. Most of the Livid related gear and instruments use Max/MSP and Jitter to process and control video. Livid itself is a piece of software that was coded in the module programming language known as Max. MSP is the audio element and Jitter is the video element. This package is being made and distributed by Cycling '74, a Bay Area based company. You can read more about the programming language on their website. Although it is primarily used under Mac OS X, Max/MSP and Jitter can also be run on Windows.