A Kinect-Powered Animation That Evolves With Your Body Movements, from Wired DESIGN:

Diagne and Lartigue’s project was commissioned by Google’s DevArt project and is called Les métamorphoses de Mr. Kalia. Like most Dreamworks flicks, it only provides a plot in the loosest sense of the word, but what it lacks in depth, Mr. Kalia’s story makes up for in dynamism by enabling gallery-goers to control the character’s movement through the Kinect’s skeleton-tracking capabilities.

“We like the idea of having something really happening,” says Diagne. “In this case, having an animation that hasn’t been crafted but that’s just the reflection of real world movement, creating a dialogue between our work and its environment.”

As visitors move through the gallery the story progresses and Mr. Kalia begins transforming. The experience is more Dalí than Disney. Mr. Kalia’s body is covered by locks, his hands turn into gushing fountains, and birds begin flocking to branches that sprout from various parts of his body.

Mr. Kalia’s transformation was brought to life using an impressive toolchain that included the Kinect, C++, Coffeescript, CSS, Google Compute Engine, Nite, Node.js, OpenFrameworks, Openni, Paper.js, Socket.io, and Tween.js, all to be rendered in a Google Chrome browser window. The character was created with vector graphics allowing it to scale and be displayed in a web browser or in an arty warehouse gallery.

“Technically speaking, one could say that this project is halfway between traditional animation and video games,” says Diagne. “We borrow from the first to tell little poetic stories with graphics and music and from the later to access another layer of storytelling through interactions.” …

Read more about the origins and discoveries leading to Mr. Kalia’s transformation here.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!