MIT Media Lab

As an undergraduate researcher, I was interested in bringing physicality into the production workflows of traditional animation. Motion capture was a well understood tool at the time but it lacked the ability to iterate on and refine a performance as with keyframe-based animation. Similarly, keyframing excelled at producing highly polished, iteratively developed performances, but often lacked the believability you get from a physical performance. My goal with geppetto was to bridge this gap and build an interface which allowed the operator to be both animator and actor - to allow the artist to use their own physicality to drive an animated performance without sacrificing the ability to iterate.