Haptic Puppetry for Interactive Games

In interactive computer games and computer animation, intuitively controlling the motion of an articulated character is considered as a difficult task. One of the reasons is that, typically, an articulated model used in the field has a high degree-of-freedom (DOF) for joints so that it is challenging to devise an easy-to-use interface to control the individual DOF. In this paper, as an alternative to existing techniques for controlling articulated characters, we propose the traditional marionette control [1] as natural interfaces to control the characters, and explain how to implement a virtual marionette based on physically-based modelling and haptic paradigm. Using our virtual marionette system, we can rapidly but easily create sophisticated motions for a high-DOF articulated character. Moreover, our system relies on haptic interfaces to model the behavior of real-world marionette controls and provides to the puppeteer responsive forces as a result of the created motions. This results in the puppeteer having a better sense of control over the marionette that she or he manipulates. Our experimentations show that our system can create reasonably complicated motions for articulated characters in an easy and quick manner at highly interactive rates.