Puppet modeling for real-time and interactive virtual shadow puppet play

Traditional shadow puppet play has been a popular local performing art and storytelling tradition in many regions of South East Asia. Currently, this traditional show is slowly becoming less popular due to the fact that the show can only be performed by professional puppeteers and there are not many of them around nowadays. Furthermore, the theater requires high cost of maintenance, and a long time and arduous task in preparing for a show. Therefore, various applications have been developed in order to allow the users to perform the shadow puppet play virtually. Most previous related works involved creating a show or storyline in off-line mode, and those that allow interactive and real-time performance provide limited interactivity and the arm movement of the shadow puppet is not realistic and free enough like an original shadow puppet movement. In this paper, we propose a method that provides more interactivity and more realistic arm movement in real-time by focusing on the holder that is attached to the wrist of the shadow puppet which is a key element in moving the arm of the traditional shadow puppet during a performance. The method uses the Bone and Bind tools function of the Flash-development platform, Adobe® Flash® CS4 or higher, together with texture mapping technique and the H-Anim standard model. In the preliminary evaluation of the method, both the experts and nonexperts gave encouraging responses and feedbacks with regard to faster and better control, and more realistic and smoother arm movement of the virtual shadow puppets.