Virtual Marionette

Developed in 2012 | Digital puppetry | Interactive installation

Puppet Parade is a magnificent good looking interactive installation developed by Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson.  Microsoft Kinect captures the motion of the hand of the digital puppeteer which drives a very awesome bird. They develop and implement a method to recognize the opening and closing of the hand that controls the mouth of the bird.

Puppet parade link: http://www.creativeapplications.net/openframeworks/puppet-parade-openframeworks/

There are many novel approaches based on microsoft kinect to animate real puppets using body motion:

Robot Kinect

Hanson RoboKind Zeno R-30 Kinect Demo

Whole-body Imitation of Human Motions with a Nao Humanoid

Developed in 2011 | Physical digital puppetry | Interactive installation

Ralph Kistler and Jan Sieber developed an animatronic marionette  from a monkey plush toy. This award winning interactive installation (New Face award in 15th Japan media arts festival) responds to the user body motion by moving a monkey toy that is hanged on the wall.  The system is based on a Microsoft Kinect device using the OpenNI framwork with the OSCeleton to track the users motion. Then, the capture data is sent via OSC to the a Processing program adjusting the joint angles to be sent again to an Arduino (microcontroller) that is located inside the puppet. The Arduino board controls ten servo motors attached to a skeleton that makes the monkey come alive.

for more information please visit: http://www.subtours.com/cms/node/76

Developed in 2011 | Digital puppetry project | Interactive installation

Yoke made an impressive virtual puppet to be used as an interactive installation at the front-store of Fredericia Theater (Denmark) promoting the musical performance of Avenue Q. Yoke developed a virtual puppet monster character based on the original Avenue Q character that is animated by the users manipulation using a Microsoft Kinect interface. The funny character covered with fur as a very cool look. The interaction is limited to the motion of the users hands, but by keeping it simple the users get a positive experience. By pressing some buttons with the monsters hands the users get access to extra functions like information about the performance.

A very interesting digital puppetry experience as an interactive public installation.

Developed in 2013 | Physical digital puppetry

Mannequin + Robot = Marionettebot

Wyang Kinect is a project developed by Antonius Wiriadjaja that upgrades the traditional Wayang Kulit puppetry manipulation to a more sophisticated way using the Microsoft Kinect.

A very interesting approach that brings the traditional puppetry into the digital puppetry.

Link to Wayang Kinect project: HERE

Softkinect presented in CES 2012 a virtual puppet show to demonstrate finger tracking feature, a gesture control system to tout “near mode” . The firmware for its DepthSense 311 should detect finger movement from as close as 15cm (vs. Kinect””””””””””””””””s 50cm) and as far away as about three feet.

A “puppet show” app that let you control two cartoon puppets with ragdoll arms

The puppets could nod their head, twist around, and open their mouths when you un-balled a fist. The twisting mechanism didn””””””””””””””””t work perfectly, and touching your hands together resulted in rather weird behavior.

Link to a video HERE

other video

Anymation is an interesting concept from Tom Jantol that describes all kinds of digital animation made with any tool. From animation film, to games, from web animation, to performance animation.

“Anymation is an exciting concept, because its adoption could forge new lines of communication and collaboration between its different children: machinima, digital puppetry, digital comics and graphic novels, stop-motion photography, digital painting, traditional CGI, and so on. These children of Anymation need not lose their identities or obliterate their own definitions. Indeed, Anymation functions best with a very heterogeneous collective of crafts and tools, each with their own identity, and each with the potential to contribute to making an Anymation idea a reality. ”

Its all about puppets

http://puppetvision.info/

A new technique brings a Jim Henson touch to a kids”””” science show

Article in the WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122004470200584377.html