PuppetPhone

When playing with toys, people cherish grasping them and manipulating them freely. They imagine characters, create stories and solve quests by moving the toys around and putting them in diverse situ- ations. A frustrating aspect of physical toys is that they are inanimate; they follow the player’s gestures like a lifeless and unconscious ragdoll. The player’s imagination then has to fill the secondary motions with compelling animations like walking, jumping and kicking.

Playing in virtual worlds tackles this shortcoming because the computer can generate full character animations with very little input. PuppetPhone implements a novel interaction metaphor that reduces the gap between physical toys and virtual characters. The user moves a smartphone around, and a puppet displayed using augmented reality responds in real-time. The virtual character moves in order to follow the user’s gestures, as if it were attached to the phone with a rigid stick. This yields a natural interaction, similar to moving a physical toy, and the puppet now feels alive because its movements are augmented with compelling animations.