A Wii For Everyone

Okay, this is very exciting...a company called Cam-Trax Technologies has developed software that allows almost any PC webcam (they say 95% of webcams are supported) to track up to four objects in real-time and with very high accuracy and reliability. Essentially, this allows you to "build your own Wii" (minus the $250 console and controllers) and opens up lots of very exciting possibilities.

The way it works is that you download an emulator to your PC (it only works with Windows unfortunately) and build a controller for your favourite video game. While the four objects is a little limiting, I don't see why this couldn't be used for conrolling digital puppets.

I have to play around with this sometime in the next week or two.

Via TechCrunch.

Behind the Scenes of Sid the Science Kid

The digital puppetry series Sid the Science Kid (see previous post) is now on the air and TV Guide recently went behind the scenes to see how the Jim Henson Company creates it. The Wall Street Journal has also been covering the show's unique production process.

Speaking of which, Brian Henson was in Silver Spring, MD at the AFI Silver Theatre yesterday and gave a presentation about the history of puppetry and how the Henson Co. has evolved over the years from Muppets to animatronics to it's latest work on Sid the Science kid using the Henson Digital Performance System.

TV Guide video via Puppeteers Unite.

29/09/08 Update: Brian Henson's presentation was at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, MD and not the Centre for Puppetry Arts as I originally reported so I've updated the post accordingly. Brian actually spoke at the Centre for Puppetry Arts on Sunday and Harvey Deneroff has some coverage on his blog.

Panda Puppet Update

It's been quite awhile since I updated Machin-X and for that I apologise; I'm hoping to be able to do more frequent updates in the future. I've gotten dozens of emails about Panda Puppet over the past few months so I wanted to post an update about the project, where it's at and what is (and isn't) happening with it right now.

I have not done any serious work on Panda Puppet for most of this year. This is due in part because I've been busy on other puppetry-related projects, but also because I have been waiting for a number of new features in Blender that I believe will improve it's usability for Machinima/digital puppetry purposes.

I do currently have a very crude working version of Panda Puppet (for Blender 2.46),but it's extremely basic, hacked together and not really suitable for public release (browse the Panda Puppet posts to see some of the old demos). There have been lots of great improvements to Blender's game engine this year (most of them developed for the Apircot video game project). The two huge new features that I've been waiting for are full character animation in real-time and real-time softbodies in Bullet, Blender's physics engine. All of the new features developed for Apricot will be included in Blender 2.48, which is tentatively scheduled for release next week. Once that is out and Ashid's great video texture plugin is updated to work with 2.48 I think it'll be time to get back to serious work on Panda Puppet again.

There seems to be serious interest in putting together a small developer's site for the project and I'm also applying for a grant that would help speed along development on Panda Puppet. In the meantime, I would love to get some help with the project. Is anybody out there handy with rigging armatures in Blender? If you are drop me a line at puppetvision {at} gmail dot com.

Second Life Lip Sync

My significant other and I hosted a small dinner party over the weekend attended by a number of fantastically talented and creative folks, one of whom is an artist who has been deeply involved in Second Life for awhile now. I talked about Panda Puppet a bit with him and we had a long discussion about Second Life and it's potential. I had rejected the idea of using Second Life for digital puppetry/Machinima purposes, but his enthusiasm for it coupled with the recent announcement of a basic lip sync tool for Second Life makes me want to reconsider (helpful lip sync tips can be found on The Second Life Wiki).

Moviesandbox Looks Promising

For quite awhile now Friedrich Kirschner has been developing Moviesandbox, a really promising set of open source tools for creating real-time animation. In the video above Friedrich demonstrates some of Movesandbox puppeteering possibilities using a Gametrak controller and a Wiimote. You can find more videos documenting the features of Moviesandbox here.

The latest beta version of Moviesandbox is available to download for free, but it requires you to have Unreal Tournament 2004 installed on your computer in order to make it work.

Video via Puppeteers Unite.

Video and Blender's Game Engine

Work continues with Panda Puppet slowly, but surely. I haven't been able to share much of what I have been doing lately because my work is focused on two client projects that I can't really blog about at this point, but I am starting up my Bear Town web series project again and plan to be using Panda Puppet heavily on that in the coming months.

What has me most excited right now though is that "Ashsid" - who wrote a lot of the original Blender scripts that much of Panda Puppet is based on - has been working on a cool new video texture plugin for Blender's game engine that allows you to combine real-time graphics with various other sources like video files, live video, rendered 3d scenes, etc. inside Blender.

This has all sorts of interesting applications, the coolest of which is tracking the movement of a camera and applying that movement to a Blender object. Here's a demo of it in action with Suzanne (the famous Blender monkey head) combined with live webcam video:



What excites me most about this is that it enables puppeteers working with monitors to have physical puppets and digital ones interact in real-time. That isn't a new idea of course, but what's great about this is that now anyone can download the software and try it themselves.

Nice work Ashsid!

Head tracking with the Wiimote

Johnny Chung Lee (see previous post) has done it again! In his latest video he explains how to use the Wiimote and Wii sensor bar to make a head tracking system. As always, you can download the software to do this yourself from Johnny's site (link goes directly to a .zip file).

The most obvious application that I can see for this in digital puppetry is a quick and easy way to track a camera in 3D space. It could also be used to allow a puppeteer to see through a character's "eyes" in a virtual environment/set.

So many things to do with the Wiimote, so little time!