Digital Marionette


' Corebounce Art Collective Corebounce Art Collective

The Digital Marionette, an interactive installation, impressively shows the audience the look and feel of a puppet in the multimedia era: The handcrafted wooden marionette is replaced by a Lara Croft-like cyber character; the traditional strings attached to the puppet control handles emerge into a network of computer cables.

The installation consists of a projection of a digital face, which can be controlled by the visitors. The puppet can talk via speech input, and the classical puppet controls serve as controllers for head direction and face emotions, such as joy, anger, or sadness. A live camera recording the puppet projection and the audience lets the anonymous puppet master observe the puppet play, as well as the other visitors’ reactions.

The translation from old to new, from analog to digital, takes place via the most popular computer input device: the mouse. The puppet control handles are attached to sliding strips of mouse pads, and eight computer mice track movements of the individual strings attached to the puppet. This approach is at the same time efficient, low-cost and easily understandable by the non-expert visitor. Speech input is realised via speech recognition, where the recognised phonemes are mapped to a set of facial expressions and visemes.

The whole artistic concept was designed and realised in an interdisciplinary manner, incorporating art historical facts about marionettes, the architectural space, interaction design, and state of the art research results from computer graphics and speech recognition.
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