Character Animator - A 2D Real-Time Animation tool from Adobe

Adobe has just unveiled a new 2D digital puppetry - or have we all agreed to call this field real-time animation now? - application called Character Animator. A demo of the software is provided in the video above, but essentially it's a tool for animating 2D bitmap (Photoshop) and vector (Illustrator) still characters in real-time using a camera, microphone, head tracking and facial mo-cap.

In addition to basic mo-cap and lip sync capabilities, it also allows users to create programmable behaviors and will support the creation of 3rd party plug ins. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it looks like it could be a very easy-to-use and potentially powerful tool for creating basic 2D animated characters in real-time.

Adobe Character Animator is currently in beta and available for testing by After Effects CC users. You can learn more here.

Via The Labyrinth.