A Master Thesis about Shadow Puppetry

 A Master Thesis about Shadow Puppetry

    I found another our former master student's thesis project, and it is about shadow puppetry. The title is Virtual Puppet: Interactive Chinese Shadow Puppetry Using Microsoft Kinect V2 by Zheng Wang. His research question is to find out what can we learn from observation research from children using the virtual puppet system. And one of his main goas of his research is to raise the interest of shadow puppetry in new generations. 

    In the chapter of Literature Review, he introduces the history of Chinese shadow puppetry and shadow puppetry in the digital era. First, he briefly talks about crisis of Chinese shadow puppetry which there are very few people to inherit this special technique. Second, he presents the existing  applications of digital puppetry.  Puppet Parade by team Design I/O, "We Be Monster" by Caitlin Boyle and Asa Foster, a shadow puppetry game by Leo Chen and Ryan Chen.

    In his approach, he also talks about how to animate 2D characters through skeleton animation and he binds the character's skeleton with the user through the Kinect skeleton tracking which allows the user to control the character through their body motions.