SoftKinetic Digital Puppetry Demo

SoftKinetic used a digital puppetry demo to show off some new firmware for their DepthSense cameras at last week's CES 2012 trade show. It highlights their new support for finger recognition, something that's difficult to accomplish with the X-Box Kinect without a lot of hacking. The firmware is still in the alpha stage, but it looks like SoftKinetic is putting together a gesture recognition system that could be really useful for digital puppetry applications.

Via The Verge.

Kinect Puppet Parade

Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille have taken their Kinect Shadow Puppet concept to the next level. Puppet Parade is an interactive Kinect installation that uses two Kinects to track the arm movements of children, enabling them to not only control on screen digital puppets, but also step in to a virtual environment and interact with them directly.

Have a look at a non-edited version of the video above so that you can hear the live sound and see how the hand movements are tracked and translated in to creature movements:



Via PSFK.

Facial Capture Using Blender 3D

The latest version of Blender 3D was released recently and has a bunch of great new features. One of the most impressive is motion tracking, which enables you to reconstruct camera animation from video and film footage, and composite 3d rendered object into movie clips. The Blender community has been busy exploring the possibilities of this new feature and several people have been attempting to use it for rudimentary motion capture.

As you can see above and below, the results so far look pretty good!





If you're feeling ambitious and want to try this for yourself you can find a tutorial here.

I've always believed that Blender had the potential to become an ideal (and totally free) professional tool for creating digital puppetry. Although I don't believe that this works in real-time - I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet - this is a huge step in that direction and suggests that we can look forward to a lot more amazing things in the future.

Via BlenderNation.

Digital Trekkie Monster

Yoke created this very cool interactive display as a publicity stunt to help promote performances of Avenue Q at the Fredericia Theater in Denmark. Passersby are able to directly control a digital version of Trekkie Monster (one of the puppet characters who star in Avenue Q) via an X-Box Kinect. A great example of how to use interactive technologies to market a product and, if you ask me, an all-around brilliant idea!

Via Kinect Hacks.

"The Internet is For Porn" screened before Congress

If you haven't been following the debate over the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, well, let's just say I have to hand it to the United States Congress. It takes a whole lot of stupid (or maybe just a whole lot of money from Hollywood studios and record labels) to come up with copyright legislation that is even more asine and one-sided than what they already have on the books in the U.S., but with SOPA they seem to have done it.

In any case, Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado with a refreshingly intelligent take on internet policy, injected a little levityby in to a debate on the bill by screening the Machinima mash-up The Internet Is For Porn before the House Judiciary committee. Rep. Polis used the video as part of an effort to add an anti-pornography amendment to SOPA, a tactically brilliant back-door legal manuevere that potentially could have made the entire piece of legislation unconstitutional.

The ammendment was ultimately defeated by a vote of 18 to 9, but not only was a Machinima film screened for the House Judiciary committee, but the entire lyrics of The Internet Is For Porn are now officially part of the congressional record. How silly (and kind of cool) is that?

Via BoingBoing.

Digital Felix The Cat from the 1980s

I only discovered this recently while doing some research for PuppetVision: The Movie (see previous post)...did you know that Felix The Cat: The Movie was one of the first films to use motion capture technology to create a computer generated character?

This digital Felix head was performed by Eren Ozker (the primary female puppeteer during the first season of The Muppet Show) and is a pioneering example of digital puppetry. Felix The Cat: The Movie was made in Europe in 1987, which means that it predates even Waldo C. Graphic. "Digital Felix" might be the very first digital puppet to ever appear in a feature film!

PuppetVision: The Movie

I’ve been writing my other blog, PuppetVision, about puppetry in all its forms since 2004. During that time puppetry has undergone an incredible renaissance. My original goal for PuppetVision was to share and help promote some of the incredible puppetry work that was being done by puppeteers all over the world. I'm proud so say that over the past seven and a half years close to half a million individual people have been able to discover and enjoy thousands of puppet films, videos and performances by hundreds of different artists thanks to the site.

What I want to do next is take what I've been doing with PuppetVision - and also here at Machin-X - to a whole new level.

For the past several years as I’ve been filming interviews with and performances by puppeteers in different cities and different countries literally all over the world. This is all going to come together in a documentary next year called PuppetVision: The Movie that will feature interviews with and performances by over sixty different puppeteers from about fifteen different countries, working in just about every style of puppetry that exists...including digital puppetry and Machinima.

My goal is to create a film that can show a mainstream audience (that is, people who don't know much about puppetry, digital or otherwise) just how much amazing work is being done around the world. I also want to give the artists who appear in the film as much exposure and publicity as possible. The finished film will be screened at film, animation and puppetry festivals internationally.

To that end I’ve launched a campaign on IndieGoGo to finish PuppetVision: The Movie. Funds raised will be used to license archival and stock footage that is needed to tell the film's story and to pay for professional sound mixing and colour correction. Best of all, if the campaign reaches its goal, I will be able to release the finished film online for free under a Creative Commons license!

PuppetVision: The Movie will be exploring the past, present and future of puppetry and as you know, I think digital technology is a big part of that future. If you’ve enjoyed Machin-X or the PuppetVision Blog for all these years, please support PuppetVision: The Movie. You’ll get some great perks and I’ll work very hard to not only make a great film, but also introduce you to some incredible puppeteers and show you some things that you’ve never seen before.

You can support this project by becoming a funder right now at IndieGoGo.com/puppetvision.

Thank you so much for your support!