Where's Waldo?

These two clips illustrate two very different contemporary Waldo Control systems.

Channel 4''s Black Mirror programme has used a digital Waldo for one of it's episodes in which a CGI character from an educational TV show turns political satirist. The character demonstrates the current apex of digital Waldo technology with a control system that looks like a fighter plane cockpit and which requires 3 puppeteers to manipulate.



There is a very clear reason for the producers decision to use a digital puppet over traditional key-framed CGI in that the performers are able to act and react in real time to the other actors and the environment. This partly reflects my own rationale towards developing a puppet controller, I say partly because other motivation for this project includes the simplification of the initial computer animation process in the hope that it may engage people who might otherwise avoid it.

This second clip shows a Waldo controller that was developed by Spencer Riedel for a robotics project while studying at college. While it is plain to see that the functionality of the controller is far more limited than that of the Waldo used in Black Mirror the concept is the same, an analogue input is used to control a digital object.



Despite the limited functionality of Spencer's Waldo it illustrates a foundation which could be built upon to develop a puppet controller that would offer the user a more natural puppeteering experience. I don't believe that it is too ambitious to hope that my controller will lie somewhere between the complexity of the puppet used in Black Mirror and Spencer's home-brew creation.