Design and Development of an Interactive Virtual Shadow Puppet Play

Shadow puppet play has been a popular traditional storytelling method for many centuries in many parts of Asia. This paper describes a method to model a virtual shadow puppet play using sophisticated computer graphics techniques available in Adobe Flash in order to allow interactive play in real-time environment as well as producing realistic animation. Areal-time method is proposed to produce the shadow image that allows interactive play of the virtual shadow puppets by using texture mapping and blending techniques. Special effects such as lighting and blurring effects for virtual shadow puppet play environment are also proposed. Moreover, the use of geometric transformations and hierarchical modeling facilitates interaction among the different parts of the puppet during animation. In essence, our methods and techniques have overcome various limitations of the existing works in virtual shadow puppet play.