So it seems really apparent at the moment how little technical kung-fu that we actually know. We’ve gotten the Kinect up and running in Jitter, but we haven’t the slightest idea how to get it to do anything. Other than play with the camera pitch control, which is surprisingly amusing. Scouring forums has proved only that there although is a lot of information out there on this topic, virtually none of it is explained. It’s as if they got past a certain complexity level and then went back and erased all evidence of the basics. Congrats Max MSP community, this shit is Nintendo hard.

With the elephant in the room being our inherent noob-saucery in this field, we need to go forward think of how we’re going to either learn some chops or deal with what we have. It looks like we’re going to have to learn (be taught?) a very large variety of things damned quickly.

The bitch of all this, at least in the planning department, is that we are working with a tool that we don’t quite know the abilities or limits of. Feasibility of ideas cannot  possibly be assessed without knowing what boundaries we’re operating within. All this withstanding… some basic ideas.

We want to make a puppet. We want to learn OSC so that we can get the Kinect working with Max, which this guy says can work with Animata. We thought about using Animata to create some sort of puppet, but then kind of realized it would basically just be using the software for it’s intended purpose. And that’s nothing unique. I think that the direction we want to go in is to have bodily actions control some sort of non-human puppet. Controlling a humanoid puppet via a human input gives you a a 1:1 with your arms controlling the puppet’s arm and your legs controlling the puppet’s legs, etc. If we make a non-humanoid puppet, we would force the audience to figure out how to control it instead of automatically assuming a 1:1 input-output ratio (am I making any sense? This is rather tough to explain).

tl;dr:

TECHNICAL

• Kinect to OSC
• OSC to Max/Jitter
• Max/Jitter to Animata

CONCEPT: A puppet that is not a direct human analog.

…Gonna be a long couple weeks.