Puppet Playing: An Interactive Character Animation System with Hand Motion Control

Puppetry is a popular art form involving the process of animating the inanimate performing puppets. Puppet playing not only is controlled by artist’s hand motions but also follows physical laws and engineering principles. To implement a puppet playing scenario in virtual environments, an interactive animation system is designed by taking into account both the user’s hand motion and the constraints of puppet and environment. Here the hand motion is realtime captured and recognized through a new input device, namely SmartGlove. The animation system adapts IMHAP testbed for procedural animation and generates puppet animation based on both the procedural animation technique and motion capture data from SmartGlove. Thus the physical hand motion can either activate the designed procedural animation through motion recognition or tune the parameters of the existing procedural animation to generate new puppet motions. This system allows a user to directly control puppet animation while preserving the high accuracy of motion control. The animation results show that the association of hand motion can smoothly plan and generate each procedure animation and seamlessly blend the gap between key frames. The potential application and improvement of the current animation system are discussed.