Shadow Puppet
Design and tech / Cultural heritage digitization / Kinect / Body tracking
This project is a real-time interactive game with Kinect boding tracking. It takes the form of an ancient Chinese football game. Players can control the Shadow-play puppets through movement and posture. It tries to digitize the traditional culture and relive it through fun interaction.
The exhibited game is a 2-player system, in which 2 players are captured by 1 Kinect.
Design Concept
Controlling puppets with neck, left hand and right hand
The traditional shadow-play game is played by controlling sticks attached to the puppets. I tried to make it more fun by controlling with full body movement. The controlling is through mapping 3 key points: neck, left hand, right hand.
Body Tracking
Extracting body and limbs
An example of real-time capturing and tracking of body and limbs.
With openFrameworks, it is easy to extract the key points with OpenCV related libraries.
Shadow Effect
To add to the atmosphere of a shadow-play game, I tried to add another shadow layer in the visual.
For example, a simple approach is to draw a layer of semi-transparent body parts with the position info from the previous frame in animated simulation. With openFrameworks, it is easy to draw anything with OpenGL and simulate puppet movement with Box2D.