WE BE MONSTERS :: a collaborative kinect puppet
WE BE MONSTERS is a prototype of a puppeteering project that uses the Kinect’s ability to track skeletons, developed for Golan Levin‘s Interactive Art/Computational Design Spring semester class. Working together with classmate Asa Foster and inspired by Theo Watson & Emily Gobeille, we developed a digital BEHEMOTH puppet that takes two people to control- like a horse costume or Snuffy from Sesame Street, one puppeteer must control the front while another controls the rear. WE BE MONSTERS was developed in Processing, using OpenNI & OSCeleton to extract skeleton data from the Kinect feed- the Puppet was then built and developed in Processing, working from Sensebloom’s Stickmanetic demo and the ‘Arm’ demo in the examples folder.
Here’s the first sketch I did for BEHEMOTH, as well as a concept sketch for a four-person puppet, the LEVIATHAN. We got a liiiiiiittle old testament.
I did the initial design work, while Asa cleaned-up and colored and BEHEMOTH in flash, taking the first step towards bringing our puppet-baby to life.
We’ll shoot a better video as the process moves along (and we get a little more sleep: 5am is not a happy time to be editing video, Let Me Tell You), but click the image below to watch our BEHEMOTH flopping about in all his floppy glory- Asa and I are puppeteering down there at the bottom, getting way too much of a kick out of making the BEHEMOTH jump.