EROShambo
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Our design for the system used a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and software, along with hardware and software designed and built by our own team.

The off-the-shelf hardware included MIDI consoles and keyboards, a magnetic tracker system and both PC and Macintosh computer systems. The software used included ProTools and MAX audio software on the Macintosh and the Alice 3D animation and visualization package on the PC.

The MIDI Virtual Puppeteer (MVP) system was arranged as follows:

The MIDI device's inputs were first processed by the MAX software package into messages which were then sent over a TCP/IP connection to the Alice system to control the Virpets. Further Virpet control came from the magnetic tracker system input to Alice.

In addition to the MIDI Virtual Puppeteer system, we created an extension to the Alice 3D visualization software package called the Motion Recorder.


Using the motion recorder we could record the puppeteered actions of any of the Virpets in the performance. In addition to simply being able to record the motions of the Virpets as they were performed live, the Motion Recorder was built to be capable of recording complex puppeteered animations one piece at a time through layering.

This layering system allowed very complicated animations to be planned out and recorded bit by bit, without requiring multiple puppeteers and animators, and without needing extra input hardware.

The system we developed was completely documented for future use and possible future enhancement:

EROShambo System Documentation
MotionRecorder Documentation
EROShambo/MAX Documentation
EROShambo/ProTools Documentation