A Character in Your Hand: Puppetry to Inform Game Controls

Abstract

As VR platforms such as HTC Vive and Oculus Touch enter the gaming market with high fidelity motion controllers, they call for a re-thinking of our game control design schemes. We present a bottom-up design exploration of traditional puppetry controls in VR and the design spaces such an experimental mapping opens up for VR gaming. We argue along 3 steps for a critical return to puppetry as a reference to design and analysis game character controls. Based on existing background research that largely emphasized puppetry as metaphor, we briefly touch on the use of puppetry in current games, before presenting our own design approach and implementation of existing puppet schemes in VR. Three initial controller mappings for virtual rod puppets, marionettes, and hand puppets serve to highlight opportunities and challenges in this approach. The overall goal is to re-establish a puppet-based perspective to character controls for VR and to highlight the emerging design space for games.