Wind-up Toy Research Articles

Parameterized gait synthesis

This article presents a method of producing gaits by using control mechanisms analogous to windup toys. The synthesis technique is based on optimization. One of the primary characteristics of "virtual windup toys" is that they are oblivious to their environment. This means that these creatures or simulated toys have no active control over balance. Nevertheless, "blind" parameterized control mechanisms can produce many common periodic gaits as well as aperiodic motions such as turns and leaps. The possibilities and limitations of this technique are presented in the context of example creatures having one, two, four, and six legs. An important attribute of the proposed synthesis method is that the motions produced can be parameterized. Thus, you can synthesize a family of motions instead of just a single fixed instance of a motion. The examples used here are: a hopping gait parameterized with respect to speed; a turning walk parameterized with respect to the turning rate, and a leap parameterized with respect to the size of the leap. The animator can thus interactively specify the hopping speed, turning rate, and leap size, respectively, for these physics-based motions.

Linda Mussman's Time and Space Limited Theatre

From the moment a Linda Mussman performance begins, it is apparent that she and her actors intend to use the theatre's basic tools—language and movement—in highly unconventional ways. Sentences begin, but splinter or dissolve into fragments before they are finished. Words are stretched and distorted and twisted out of shape. Phrases drone like incantations till their meanings dissolve. The actors move in quick athletic bursts, or haltingly like wind-up toys, or in formal patterns like dancers. They freeze unexpectedly with a face or hand or foot isolated in a pool of light. Whether it is Mussman's own playfully abstract poetry as in her “triptych” Room/Raum, Door and Window (1978-79), the flowing rhetoric of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death (1980), or the delicate narrative of a Japanese fantasy play, The Bandit Princess (1978), the language of the piece is fragmented, its delivery restructured, and it is associated with oddly stylized movement.