Johnny Bravo Live
In the year 2000, Cartoon networks presented and broadcasted a live cartoon show, Johnny Bravo was a 2D cartoon digital puppet animated in real-time. Johnny Bravo was a kind of “CJ” or cartoon jockey listening to request from telephone for nostalgic cartoons.
Kydara FilmBox On-Air was the first commercial solution to provide a generic real-time animation system using motion capture. It brought more flexibility to the broadcast industry because production houses or television channels could produce their own lives shows.
Producers or animators/puppeteers could trigger 3D/2D animation clip sequences in real-time.
This solution was designed to provide performance and versatility for live broadcasting.
Although the character is not fully live animated it can respond to real-time impulses creating the feeling of interaction with the audience. In a matter of fact, the only thing that is live performance is the lip-sync, it recognizes the sounds spoken by an onset actor and changes the image of the mouth to the most correspondent one.
The puppeteer just press buttons to trigger animations. The animations are previous built from dozens of animated sequences made with hundreds of frames.
The Cartoon Networks used a beta version of On-Air.
Reference: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2000/Volume-23-Issue-8-August-2000-/Cartoon-Jockey.aspx