It would be really cool if you can animate the objects you see in your room by “being” the object itself.

So what would you need? No motion capture. No model rigging. A Kinect will suffice.

Microsoft came up with this system KinÊtre that lets you do exactly that.

The problem is that of finding correspondence between the actor and the character graphs and then being able to keep track of the deformation produced by the motion of the actor and propagating it back to the character. It is a little more involved than that because the character to be animated is a mesh.

This work is analogous to the work done at University of Washington on the project Being John Malkovich. This project enabled an user to control another person’s face in real-time.