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, cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

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 on the street 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, cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

Luis Miguel Barbosa is doing some interesting experiments with digital puppetry. His Virtual Marionette project uses an iPad to control a digital puppet character using the free, open-source Animata digital puppetry software (see previous post). This takes advantage of the iPad’s multi-touch interface to control multiple control points simultaneously in real-time.

He’s also experimenting with something he calls WIIMATA, which uses two WIImotes to control a character inside Animata:

Neat stuff.

Cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

Tomorrow would have been the 75th birthday of Jim Henson. To help celebrate his life and career Google has teamed up with the Jim Henson Company. If you visit the Google Homepage tonight or tomorrow you’ll see a special “Google Doodle” featuring six digital puppets that you can perform using your mouse and keyboard.

It’s pretty neat to see digital puppets on the homepage of Google, but what I especially love about this is the way that it seems to be unleashing people’s creativity. Within hours of the Google Doodle’s appearance videos of digital puppeteering began popping up on YouTube. So far most of them seem to be making “digital puppet karoke” videos.

Here’s one of the Black Eyed Peas’ Boom, Boom, Pow:

…and one of Earth Angel:

Pretty neat, huh?

Cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

Over at my Machin-X: Digital Puppetry blog, I did a post today about “facial puppetry” a really interesting and quickly emerging computer vision technique. You can see an example above and read the full post on Machin-X for links and more information.

This is a fun little demo of a digital puppet that Seth Hunter is working on with puppeteer Dan Butterworth at the MIT Media Lab. Like a lot of digital puppetry projects such as Animata, it draws a lot of inspiration from shadow puppetry techniques. The software works by tracking points on a puppet that correlate in real-time to a digital version of the character. Users have the ability to change costumes and record animations and there are future plans to enable character customization as well as remote play.

Cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

Students at Carnegie Mellon University have been experimenting with various forms of digital puppetry for years so it’s not surprising that they’re now busy dreaming up some pretty cool projects using the X-Box Kinect (see previous post). A good example of this is We Be Monsters, a Kinect hack by students Caitlin Rose Boyle and Asa Foster that turns participants into a two-person puppet, “inspired by multi-person Chinese dragon costumes and (Mr.) Snuffleupagus.” It’s a cool project that’s somewhat similar to the previously-blogged Animata software.

You can see more examples of the great interactive work that CMU students are cooking up over at Create Digital Motion.

Cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

The more artists explore new frontiers in interactive art, the more I often mind myself wondering where exactly to draw the line between what is animation and what is puppetry. A good recent example of this is the recently-blogged augmented shadow puppetry, which is sort of shadow puppetry, but also sort of not.

Another good example is this performance system created by Chris O’Shea called Little Magic Stories. It was made using the X-Box Kinect (see previous post) and the old Pepper’s Ghost Vaudeville trick.

So is this animation? Puppetry? Or something else entirely?

Via CrunchGear, cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

Following up on Wednesday’s post about digital puppetry using the Kinect, this “Augmented Shadow” project is another (albeit less conventional) example of digital puppetry. I love how more and more artists are experimenting with using technology to create projects like this!

Via Mark at Great Small Works.

Back in November I wrote about those Kinect digital shadow puppets that went viral. Well, Kinect hacking has come a long way in the few short months since then and the potential implications for digital puppetry are huge. I was at a small meet-up for Kinect hackers here in Toronto last night and tried a very rudimentary version of “Kinect puppetry” that an animator I know has been working on and it was very cool. Affordable, accessible digital puppetry is here, it’s real and if you already have a computer and a little technical know-how you can do it yourself for under $200.

Here’s an impressive demo of Kinect puppetry using the previously-blogged Japanese “Vocaloid” Hatsune Miku using the Kinect and free software from the VPVP Project:

Aside from the Kinect itself (which retails for around $150), most of the software needed to try this yourself can be downloaded for free. You will need some sort of 3D program like Blender and a 3D game engine; fortunately “lite” or “learning” versions of commercial game engines like Motionbuilder and Unity can be downloaded for free and some people are using Ogre 3D, which is free and open source. The exact methods to make your own digital puppets will vary depending on which software you use, but lots of tutorials can be found by searching online.

Not all digital puppetry with the Kinect has to be three dimensional though. Here’s a neat 2D demo done in the style of shadow puppetry. It’s part of a project called Virtual Marionette:

Although I do think this is huge step forward for open, accessible digital puppetry there are still some problems to solve before Kinect can be used to create truly emotive, expressive characters. For one thing, the skeletal tracking in these demos is very simple without individual finger movements or any kind of facial expression. Those problems aren’t unsolvable though and I have some ideas on how to tackle them, but that’s another post.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in this rapidly emerging field, be sure to subscribe to my other blog Machin-X: Digital Puppetry, which focuses exclusively on digital puppetry, real-time animation and related technologies.