Virtual Marionette

Developed in 2013 | Physical digital puppetry

Mannequin + Robot = Marionettebot

Leap Motion – A low-cost hand/finger interface

Similar to the Microsoft Kinect, Leap Motion presents a powerful hand interface that can be used as a controller device for digital puppetry or for many other applications like painting, modeling…

Users can define their own gestures and mapped them using the free SDK delivered with the piece of hardware.

“Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It””s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.”

Wrist-worn 3D hand tracker (Digits – “on the move” interface)

Microsoft Kinect 2 will be released in 2013 and probably one of the new features will be finger tracking. Until then there is a wearable hardware device presented in 2012 by the Microsoft research division in the UK that recognizes and track with accuracy the user´s hand movement.

Components:

1. Inertia Sensor (measurement unit)
2. InfraRed diffuse ilumination
3. InfraRed Camera
4. InfraRed Laser Line

“Our hands are extremely dexterous, making them the primary mechanism to manipulate and interact with the physical world. Understandably a considerable focus of HCI* research has been in transferring such ‘natural’ hand manipulations into the digital domain. However, current user interfaces rarely leverage the full dexterity of our hands,”

Digits: freehand 3D interactions anywhere using a wrist-worn gloveless sensor (ACM paper)

http://kotaku.com/5950393/microsofts-new-gadget-lets-you-control-any-device-with-a-mid+air-gesture