Active voodoo dolls: A vision based input device for nonrigid control

A vision based technique for nonrigid control is presented that can be used for animation and video game applications. The user grasps a soft, squishable object in front of a camera that can be moved and deformed in order to specific motion. Active Blobs, a nonrigid tracking technique is used to recover the position, rotation and nonrigid deformations of the object. The resulting transformations can be applied to a texture mapped mesh, thus allowing the user to control it interactively. Our use of texture mapping hardware in tracking makes the system responsive enough for interactive animation and video game character control.