Virtual Marionette Project

Luis Miguel Barbosa is doing some interesting experiments with digital puppetry. His Virtual Marionette project uses an iPad to control a digital puppet character inside Animata (see previous posts). This takes advantage of the iPad's multi-touch interface to control multiple control points simultaneously in real-time.

He's also experimenting with something he calls WIIMATA, which uses two WIImotes to control a character inside Animata:



Neat stuff.

We Be Monsters: Multi-Person Digital Puppets

Carnegie Mellon University has been a leader in interactive studies (including lots of digital puppetry work) for years now so it's not surprising that CMU students have been busy dreaming up some pretty cool projects using the Kinect. A good example of this is We Be Monsters, a Kinect hack by students Caitlin Rose Boyle and Asa Foster that turns participants into a two-person puppet, “inspired by multi-person Chinese dragon costumes and (Mr.) Snuffleupagus.” It's a cool project that's somewhat similar to the previously-blogged Animata software.

You can see more examples of the great work that Carnegie Mellon students are cooking up over at Create Digital Motion.

Digital Puppetry with Animata

Animata is open source real-time animation software, "designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances". The goal of Animata is to make it really easy to create scenes with digital puppets that can be controlled via physical sensors, microphones or cameras.

Animata is another very promising digital puppetry system and it's already been used for a couple of interesting projects. Animata Jazz Pub is an interesting demo that shows how the Animata software can be used to react to live audio input. Reverse Shadow Theatre (seen above) is an installation that was created with Animata, inspired by Wayang Kulit, an Indonesian form of shadow puppet theatre.

If you want to try playing around with the software yourself, the Animata software can be downloaded for free for both the Mac and PC. The source is licensed under the GPL and can also be downloaded from Google Code.

Reverse Shadow Theatre link via Mary Robinette-Kowal.