Archiving Performative Objects

Archiving Performative Objects is a NEH grant funded research project I assisted with while I was a graduate student at Georgia Tech. The project was an attempt to remediate existing archival puppets from the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta in a way where the user could play and perform with these artifacts in a way that preserves their physical properties. The study involved both trained puppeteers and untrained users, each of whom tried out 1 puppet / puppetry form at a time in the lab before providing qualitative feedback on the experience.

I was responsible for the all of the programming on the project, and I helped design the interfaces and control schemes that we used for each of the puppets alongside Michael Nitsche . Another student, Veronica Spencer, did the 3D scans of the puppets and remodeled them using the scans as reference. The project was developed in Unity, and I made use of VRTK and ObiRope to expediate development. I primarily worked on ways to wrangle the Physx engine to support complex puppet simulations and worked out control schemes that support users manipulating Rigidbodies from multiple controllers at the same time.