Kinect-Powered Hologram

Another amazing Kinect hack...researchers at MIT built a rudimentary holographic video system using an X-Box Kinect. They even re-create the famous hologram of Princess Leia from Star Wars in this demo video.

Real-time, 3D holographic digital characters anyone?

Via Fast Company.

More Kinect Digital Puppetry Developments

New X-Box Kinect developments seem to keep coming fast and furious. At CES 2011, Microsoft has been demoing it's forthcoming Avatar Kinect for X-Box Live; essentially it's a platform that allows you to control a 3D avatar of yourself in real-time via body and facial movements. I suspect that the technology isn't quite ready to go yet (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's demo above was canned and not done live), but Engadget has a video of a live demo of Avatar Kinect here.

Meanwhile, in other Kinect news, someone has hacked together some impressive-looking real-time motion capture using the Kinect:



(Motion capture video via Blendernation)

Puppetry on the iPad

I'm really intrigued by the possibilities that Multi-touch devices like the iPad might offer puppeteers in the near future. Several developers are exploring exactly that and looking for ways to combine puppetry and interactive media. One of these is iPuppeteer, which allows you to control a simple, marionette-like puppet on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Another is Pollock's Toy Theatre, a new iPad app that rides the wave of resurgent interest in toy theatre that's been happening during the past few years and tries to take it in to the digital age.

While both of these apps seem to offer only basic functionality (for now), it will be interesting to watch the app market and see what develops over the next year or so.

Cross-posted from PuppetVision.

Pinokio 3D

There seems to be a lot of interesting things brewing on the digital puppetry front these days. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that 2011 might be a breakthrough year for real-time animation.

I hope to get back to sharing some of the exciting things that are happening out there in the new year, but until then enjoy "Pinokio 3D" a digital puppet created using Blender that debuted at the 14th Annual Circus, Clowns and Street Shows Argentine Conference in Argentina. The video is in Spanish, but more info is available (in English) in this thread on the BlenderArtists Forum.

Kinect Interactive Puppet

Long (very long) time no post here...I've been very excited about the new Kinect for Xbox 360, which seems to offer all kinds of interesting possibilities for digital puppetry, especially since it's already been hacked.

Two designers, Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson, have whipped up this digital puppet prototype with it. It's a 2D puppet that uses skeleton tracking on an arm to control the movement and posture of the puppet. They hacked it together in a day using open-source Kinect drivers, which is pretty cool.

I think we'll see a lot more stuff like this using the Kinect very, very soon.

Blender Game Engine Evolution

As you can see in this demo, Blender's Game Engine has come a long way in a short time (the video above was rendered in real-time, not frame-by-frame). Actually, the GE is capable of even more than what this video demonstrates; the latest version (2.49) was recently released and includes a bunch of cool features including video textures and real-time dome rendering as well as improved modifier support, speed, logic and physics.

As the GE gets better and better, more and more people seem to be interested in using Blender to create Machinima and digital puppetry. You can download the latest version of Blender from Blender.org.

The next release of Blender, version 2.5 is a major overhaul of the program's underlying code, some of which dates back to 1994(!). I'm especially excited about the proposed new animation system “Animato” and the new event system, which you can see demonstrated below:



Although I don't think the GE is the focus on the 2.5 release, you can bet that at least a few improvements are on the way. Experimental builds of Blender 2.5 can be downloaded from Graphicall, but they may not be stable and aren't necessarily suitable for production use yet.

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series

I haven't had time to check out Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series or the feature film from whence it sprung for that matter, but it certainly looks good. The six-part series serves as a prequel to the feature film and features Blair Williams, played in the film by Moon Bloodgood, who voices the character in the Machinima series.

The series was made entirely using in-game assets from the Terminator Salvation video game and was overseen by Terminator Salvation director McG, who's building an innovative little empire for himself in Hollywood these days. This is the first official studio-produced Machinima series and it's such a great example of cross-platform synergy that it's easy to foresee a lot more of these kinds of projects in the future.

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series is available to download from iTunes and the X-Box Live Marketplace. Free recaps of each episode are available to watch on Machinima.com.