The N-Controller Avenger

The N-Controller Avenger is a clip-on product for standard X-Box controllers "designed for harcore gamers who want to take their abilities to the next level." Essentially, it's a casing that fits over a regular controller so that you can keep your thumbs on the controller's analog sticks while simultaneously having all of the buttons within reach. You can see more videos of it in action on the Avenger Controller website.

Although I'm admittedly not a hardcore gamer, the N-Controller seems a bit like overkill for most video games to me, but I do wonder about it's potential for digital puppetry applications. I've tried doing digital puppetry with game pads in the past and never liked it. At just $40 each I'm tempted to order one of these and try it out to see if it's useful.

Via Joystiq.

Machinima.com Gets Techcrunched

Techcrunch - one of the web's leading tech industry blogs - has an interesting post about Machinima.com today talking about the huge audience numbers the website has been racking up; 2.3 billion video views last year (350 million in of them in December alone)and over 45 million unique visitors. The article also mentions that Machinima.com has over 90 staff in L.A. producing their various online shows every week.

Part of the article that will especially warm the hearts of longtime Machinima creators is this:

He (Machinima.com owner Allen DeBevoise) tried to raise money back then (in 2005) but the audience was seen as too niche, maybe 5 million people if Machinima was lucky. Clearly everyone underestimated what was brewing here.

I think that's a huge understatement. Machinima isn't quite mainstream yet, but these numbers prove that it's already taken off as a medium in a very big way.

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.