Digital puppetry hardware, part two: The Nintendo Power Glove

Remember the Nintendo Power Glove?

The Power Glove was supposed to spark a revolution and forever change the way video games were played, but it didn't. Mostly because it sucked. It didn't work very well and when it did all it was really good for was playing a few rounds of Punch Out for novelty value, after which you'd switch back to the regular NES controller because it was better designed and easier to use.

Even though the Power Glove never really worked, it did look incredibly cool in this TV commercial. I remember seeing that when I was about 13 and immediately thinking about how cool it would be to be able to one day use something like it to perform a digital puppet like Waldo C. Graphic on The Jim Henson Hour. Lots of other more knowledgeable people saw it's potential too and it was first hacked for doing virtual reality on the PC in the early `90s. Nowadays Power Glove-like input and control devices are called data gloves and they're used for everything from creating music to performing medical procedures.

And I still think it would be cool to use something like this to control digital puppets.

To be continued...

Realtime Film Festival seeking entries

Here's something interesting...The Realtime Film Festival takes place May 2-4 in Stuttgart, Germany, as a part of the FMX conference for animation, effects, games and postproduction and the Stuttgart Festival for Animated Film. They are currently seeking entries in the following categories:

Cut Scenes - Films and sequences which are part of computer or console games based on realtime technology like intros, trailers etc.

Flash - Films in the SWF format, using realtime features of Macromedia Flash (eg. Actionscript,tweenings).

Machinima - Movies shot in real time with game engines.

Demos - Small EXE programs that make the computer generate 3D animations in realtime.

VJ Visuals - Realtime shows by VJs mixing visuals live to the music (please send in a showreel that documents your live performance).

While there's bound to be several Machinima entries, I'm curious to know if there will be any other examples of digital puppetry entered in the festival.

Link via MachiniBlog.

Lights, Camera, Play!

The Dallas Observer has a great article today called Lights, Camera, Play! that provides a good overview of the Machinima phenomenon and where the artform is currently at. Highly recommended reading, especially if you've heard me or others talking about Machinima, but still aren't sure what it's all about.

Belated Machinima predictions for 2006

Paul Marino has posted his predictions for Machinima in 2006 and filmmaker Ken Thain has chimed in with his own, slightly more tongue-in-cheek ones as well (the more familiar you are with the Machinima scene, the funnier Ken's will be).

Digital Fraggles?

Mathew Patrick Sullivan's fan rendering of Fraggle Rock's Red Fraggle (Red Fraggle © Jim Henson Productions).

Jim Henson Productions has announced plans for a Fraggle Rock movie. Speculation is that this will be similar to the original CBC/HBO series with the conventional Fraggle puppets in "Outer Space" (the show's term for the world outside Fraggle Rock), but gather together any rabid Fraggle fans and they'll instantly start speculating about puppets being replaced with pixels*.

Normally, I'd think that was a horrible idea, but after seeing some work-in-progress 3D fan art of Red Fraggle created by Mathew Sullivan in Maya I can't help wondering, what would a digital Fraggle Rock would be like?

Here's some pics of Mathew's model:

Front View

Side View

Rear View

...after all, Henson has the technology.

*Note: I can't emphasize enough that the above images are fan art. Very little information has been released by Henson about the forthcoming Fraggle Rock movie and there is no indication that anything other than conventional puppets will be used.

Virtual Shadow Puppetry

UBC alumni Paul Kry experiments with some virtual shadow puppetry.

UBC Computer Science grad Paul Kry seems to have done some interesting research in to problems surrounding modelling and animating human hands via motion capture for his PhD thesis, including some experiments with creating virtual shadow puppets in a 3D environment. Click here for a video, but be warned that it's a 33.7 mb avi file and a bit of a beast to download.

It's a big, big, digital world

A whole host of animal characters welcome viewers to the Big, Big World

It's a Big, Big World is a new preschool series from Mitchell Kriegman, the creator of Bear in the Big Blue House. The show debuted on PBS earlier this week and features a diverse group of animal characters brought to vibrant life in a lush jungle setting using a patented Bunraku-like CGI process Kriegman calls "Shadowmation".

Shadowmation is a unique animated process that utilizes real-time virtual sets and Bunraku-style team puppetry. Like action animatronic characters are integrated with computer generated animation in real time, high definition virtual environments. The process allows all the advantages of animatronics, the expressiveness of live performance, and the freedom and range of computer animation. It's was first used and developed for the Disney Channel series Book of Pooh.

While the show isn't true digital puppetry per se, Shadowmation is a very cool digital technique and this looks like it will be a great series. You can watch an online preview of the series at PBS.org and read more about it over at the St. Petersburg Times.