PuppetTalk: Conversation Between Glove Puppetry and Internet of Things

Glove Puppetry is popular in Chinese societies. Glove puppet shows have been performed in a traditional (manual) way for over 300 years. Due to the advances in information and communications technology (ICT), we can extend glove puppet art in a very different dimension. However, existing ICT solutions for puppet control have not demonstrated the time complexities for their control mechanisms nor how they can effectively control the puppets. This paper proposes PuppetTalk, an Internet of Things (IoT) application platform for puppet control. We allow multiple input IoT devices such as smart gloves to control a puppet robot, and smartphones can be used to control the sequences of actions on that robot at the same time. In particular, the PuppetTalk Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows users to quickly configure multiple distributed devices to control a puppet robot. Also, controlling puppet legs using a second glove and puppet movements with hand gestures in real time through smart phones are both innovations that have not appeared in the literature so far. When multiple input devices are used to control a puppet robot, their instructions must be received by the robot in a correct sequence. We have conducted measurements, simulation and analytic modeling to show that PuppetTalk can correctly control a puppet robot by multiple input devices with the probability higher than 99.7%.