Hands on : virtual art installation : interactive shadow puppetry

Abstract

The author of this report, Ms. Listya Utami Harjadi, implemented a different way of story-telling by creating a highly interactive digital shadow theatre for her Final Year Project (FYP), which uses Wii Remotes as the mode of interaction. The Interactive Shadow Puppetry project aims to allow a puppeteer control digital shadow puppets using the Wii Remotes. Furthermore, the interaction is further pushed to another level by involving the audience active participation during the digital shadow theatre performance, by also manipulating the digital content.

The project started off with the conceptualization stage before the author decided on the implementation of the Interactive Shadow Puppetry art installation based on the specified basic requirements. Then all of the components to be involved were carefully designed, followed by their respective development and testing. Finally, the prototype was set-up to demonstrate the possibilities of controlling digital content using Wii Remotes by processing the functions via Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and Java programming language.

Despite some of the complexities and limitations faced in the course of developing the project, the author was still inspired to do an even deeper study and explore more possibilities that have yet to be implemented in this project.