Digital puppetry on the X-Box?

Microsoft announced yesterday that XNA Game Studio Express, which lets aspiring developers work towards creating Xbox 360 games, is available for download on the XNA development environment home page. At the moment the software is beta and it will only let developers build Windows binaries, but Microsoft is promising that games can be migrated to the 360 console by Christmas (more info is available at Playfuls.com).

Of course when I heard this I immediately thought about how cool would it be to have someone develop a digital puppetry platform using the X-Box 360? Recently Atari founder Nolan Bushnell gave a speech to the video game industry and said "I believe that in the next five years, there will be a movie that will make over $100 million that will be made by three people" (sorry, I can't find a relevant link for proper attribution).

I think he's right and considering what a fantastic console the X-Box 360 is if you don't need to know C++ to make software for the X-Box and Microsoft does this right, things could get very interesting for Machinima and digital puppetry very fast.

Thanks to C.B. for the heads-up about this!

'Game sketching' and puppetry in video games

Professor John Buchanan from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Centre spoke at the Melbourne International Film Festival's X Media Lab last week about a concept he calls "game sketching", where puppeteering is used to help design and build video games more affordably. It's just one more example of how puppetry techniques can be applied to digital technologies and I'm not surprised to hear it coming from one of the Entertainment Technology Centre's professors since the institution is one of the world's leading centres for digital puppetry research.

Digital puppetry - the future of Fan Films?

A screenshot from the Star Wars video game Knights of the Old Republic.

Last week TheForce.net published the third in a series of articles on the future of fan films. It's a great read and makes the case for Machinima as the ideal medium in which fan filmmakers can affordably recreate the complex Star Wars universe and includes a step-by-step overview of the process of using video games to create Machinima fan films.

Digital Bush puppet

Former Baltimore Sun editorial cartoonist Kevin "Kal" Kallaugher has developed an interactive digital puppet of George W. Bush in collaboration with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Imaging Research Center. His creation was publicly unveiled at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum last night as part of a show of his work called Mightier Than The Sword. The goal of the project is to use digital puppetry as a form of editorial cartooning at a time when newspaper circulation is falling and the public is increasingly turning to other forms of media for political commentary.

Kal will be demonstrating the puppet again publicly as part of his "Afternoon with Kal" lecture at the museum June 25th. Tickets are $5-10 plus the price of museum admission.

Digital rabbit puppet video

This is a digital puppetry demo from Animocap, a small company in Asia that is developing digital puppetry applications for mass use. The story behind Animocap is interesting and while their starter software is extremely limited, I think their overall approach is right on. You can download their starter kit for free and experiment with puppeteering talking heads on your computer in real-time using a keyboard. It won't allow you to do anything nearly as sophisticated as what you see in the video above, but it's still neat to check out.

I'm not clear whether this video was done with the Pro version of their software or not, but I'll try to find out.

Video via A Puppet Resource.

Nintendo wii = digital puppetry machine?

While the debate continues to rage over wii the stupid official name of the next-generation Nintendo console (it was previously code-named Revolution), Brian Stokes speculates about the wii's potential as a tool for digital puppetry in his blog today.

Pipecleaner dance

That's one footloose pipecleaner!

Here's a neat little interactive digital puppet made using a pipecleaner, a few digital stills and a little Flash. It's been around for several years apparently, but I hadn't seen it until today. It was created by David Bessler and you can read a little about it's history on his blog.

Simple, but lots of fun!

Thanks to Miryana for pointing this out.