Puppetmation
Animation for Everyone!
Puppetmation was designed to be an accessible animation platform. Simply put on a sock puppet, point it at a webcam, and users will be able to make fun digital puppet shows using an actual puppet as their tool.
I wanted this project to be as simple as possible, or at least seem that way. The puppet is just that--a sock puppet, made from felt, ping-pong balls, and a fuzzy sock. I followed a wonderful tutorial by Ana DIY Crafts to create Orangthany (the purple puppet) and Notyet (the blue prototype puppet).
In order to get the most accurate mouth shapes, I found a tutorial for custom-made capacitive sensors called zPatch. These sensors are made from scratch, and are therefore extremely customizable and quite sensitive. The creators made an Arduino library for the patches, so programming was straightforward. I simply mapped the values produced from the capacitive sensors to he height of the mouth.
The first iteration of this puppet used color tracking to track where the puppet was. A later iteration used an infrared LED, which was more effective, but requires a specially modified PlayStation Eye (or other specific camera) to make full use of. In the future I will use machine learning and create my own library of objects, like the eyebrows, that the camera will be able to track and is built into the application.
The following video was one I made for a course on my Masters degree, and shows Puppetmation in action.
