Animating 2D Digital Puppets with Limited Autonomy

Digital puppets are animated personas that augment online educational materials with commentary and summaries. Their animations are generated dynamically based on user-authored text, contextual hints, and domain goals, allowing the puppet to act with limited autonomy within specific domains. In this paper we describe the graphical realization and authoring of a 2D digital puppet. We present a build-once, use-forever production path that allows us to quickly create new character behaviors, and makes the production of 2D personas feasible. We describe two digital puppet applications and explain how the animation capability is supported across domains.