Project Description

Character Part SwapAnimateering is a kiosk where kids can puppeteer virtual characters. The original Animateering was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Children's Museum to allow kids to play with virtual copies of their real, but untouchable puppet collection. With two puppets on the screen at a time, there where two connected stations where you could play. At each station was a touchscreen for selecting a puppet, two joysticks for controlling upper body and lower body motion, and six buttons to trigger different animations and sounds.

After the museum installation, we wanted to expand Animateering and take it in new directions. Rebuilding the entire project from scratch, our new concept involved more generic puppets with separate heads, torsos, and legs that could be mixed and matched. The touchscreens were still used to select puppets and swap their parts, but we designed an entirely new interface for controlling them.
New Animateering Consoles Previously, the puppets would only stand in place and lean slightly, but we have them the ability to walk around the stage using one of the joysticks. To give Animateering a more puppeteering feel, we replaced the second joystick which controlled upper body motion with a custom designed marionette cross interface. In addition to five buttons to trigger animations, we added a large glowing red button for randomizing the puppet's parts and two knobs for adjusting the size of the puppet's head and body. Three shared buttons were used to mix and match backgrounds, props, environmental sound effects, and music. Finally, we also added the ability to record a movie of your performance that would be burned to a CD for you to take home.

My Role

Working collaboratively with a hardware interface designer and a 3D character modeler, the three of us came up with the design for the new "Puppet Workshop" phase of Animateering. I was the sole programmer on this project and was responsible for rebuilding the basics of Animateering from scratch. In order to enable the combining of parts from different puppet models, I had to come up with and document the basic requirements for 3D modelers designing and animating characters for this version of Animateering. I also had to build a set of tools to take these 3D models and animations and break them up into their separate parts and prepare them for being combined. Working with the hardware designer who wanted to add lots of physical controls such as buttons, joysticks, and lights as well as the new marionette interface, I had to come with ways to connect all these devices to the computer and a procedure to calibrate them with minimal difficulty to the operator. In order to record movies of guests' performances without slowing down the live play, I had to develop a special system of recording the state of the program add all interaction into a recording session. I could then use these recording sessions to preview a guest's movie. If the session was accepted it would be sent to a separate networked machine which would process the session, generate the movie, and burn the CD.