Imagine being able to speak with and interview your favorite virtual characters. How exciting would that be? The Puppetineering project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center aims to allow you to do just that. The goal of our project is to give personal interactions with virtual characters. We are designing an experience that completely breaks the 4th wall and makes it so virtual characters are able to speak directly with their real-life fans. Puppetineering stands for puppet plus engineering. We are creating a tool that allows a person to control and puppeteer a virtual character, giving it a full range of movements, voice, and emotion. The end product is a prototype that people will be able to interact with and hopefully, with a little magic, people will allow themselves to be lost in the experience and believe that they are actually speaking and responding to a virtual character.
