Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Digital Puppetry Round-up

It's been far too long since I've updated Machin-X, so to try to catch up here's a look at bunch of interesting things that have been happening in the past few months:

Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research are working on a system for "motion capture on the go" that utilizes body mounted cameras, which opens up some intriguing technological possibilities (via Tech Crunch).

In Australia, Jason Saragih is working on an interesting system for doing facial puppetry. His work on facial expression recognition looks particularly impressive so far.

Check out the visual insanity that is the Unreal 3 graphics engine.

Using the Kinect for digital puppetry keeps getting easier.

Digital puppetry with Wiimotes, using the Unity 3D engine.

Blender continues to be expanded and refined. The latest stable version (and last of the 2.5 series) Blender 2.59 was recently released and a number of exciting new features are being planned for future releases, including better support for motion capture and an improved real-time animation system.

Finally, old puppetry meets new technology with the "Naked Puppet" digital sock puppet.

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