Conceptual Statement

The project, ‘Digital Puppet’ is a face recognition display that allows users to control a digital puppet with facial recognition through a camera. This concept was designed to allow parents to communicate with their children through an easier method. Research shows that children from age’s five to ten are the most disobedient ages for the youth. With that in mind the communication between parents and their children become difficult making it harder for them to teach their kids valuable lessons that they hope they could learn during that age gap. So this projects goal is to change that, since children become more obedient to those they look up to and respect, parents would be able to stream themselves as their child's favourite hero in puppet form providing an easier teaching method for the parent and a more enjoyable lesson for their child.

Originally the idea behind this project was based around animation and taking same idea to the next level such as viewers being able to control an animation through a 3D holographic display. But that was soon found to be too difficult to achieve, where the program and equipment to achieve this is out of budget. Thus the creation of a 2D puppet that could be manipulated in real time on a TV screen was created, achieving the same goal that was intended for the viewers to perceive. What was found difficult was the amount of bugs encountered in the creation of the puppet, and also the creation of the puppet itself. The puppet had issues such as the puppet not syncing properly with the user. Witnessing delays or even not moving at all, this was then solved by changing the camera and also providing better lighting to the area so the details on the face would be easily picked up by the camera. The puppet itself was created on Photoshop but through an unorthodox method. The difficulties with working with over hundreds of layers was proven challenging as oppose to the regular five to ten layers that is normally used. What made this hard to adapt to be the fact that each layer serves its own separate role for the puppet and misplacement in layers would cause disruption to the entire project. But going through many trial and errors, puppet after puppet and understanding the reasoning behind each layer became easier and manageable. The main issue that was most difficult to face was to present the puppet in a way where it fully projects the intended goal which was mainly targeted towards adults. But since it could be alternatively seen as a way for children to play as their favourite hero instead of the original goal is then altered but not drastically making a difference, where it could still be an activity for parents to communicate with their children.

Through the creation of this project, many new skills have been developed, programs being learnt and skills being honed. Firstly the program ‘Character Animator’ is a completely new program that is like no other, so to understand this program was proven difficult due to never working with anything similar. But through this program skills such as face recognition, character design, voice recognition and puppet manipulation was learnt in the process. From the creation of the puppet to applying physics, key triggers and even facial recognition. Another program used was Photoshop, which was a familiar program, but using it as the main base to create the puppet was very different and challenging, from having each layer containing different parts of the puppet as well as managing compulsory names for the layers was indeed difficult at first compared to having every part on a few layers. But through this skills in Photoshop, Character Animator, character design and layer management were all developed.

Overall the project ‘Digital Puppet’ was able to achieve its set goals that allows users to freely control the puppet with nothing but their face, but the main goal and message could be presented in a much more distinguished method. An example of this would be presenting two controllable puppets instead of one, parents would then be able to play as a separate puppet as their children plays the other giving them more options to interact with. Granting the same but more distinguished goal this project could achieve. This would provide much more interaction from not just the user to the puppet, but also user to user interaction. Therefore greatly enhancing the overall presentation and message of the project.