At Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the answer was to create technology that allows a non-technical performer to "puppeteer" a computer graphics character. To meet that design challenge required the "imagineering" of a technological marvel running on customized software and powered by AMD Athlon™ processors. Welcome to the brave new world where "live" and "virtual" performances are one and the same.

Jim Henson first brought puppetry to television in 1954, while he was still in high school. From a local Saturday morning show in Washington, D.C. to network guest appearances to Sesame Street, Henson reached an ever-expanding audience with his creativity and imagination. At each step of the way, he worked tirelessly to master his understanding of the dominant entertainment media---television and film. Today, The Jim Henson Company is a multimedia production company, one of the top character licensors in the industry, a leading publisher of children's books and home to Jim Henson Television, Jim Henson Interactive and Jim Henson Pictures. Kermit the Frog™, The Muppet Show, and movies such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth are part of Henson's enduring legacy.

Adding to the legacy are Jim Henson's London and Los Angeles Creature Shops, where inanimate creatures are brought to life through hand puppetry, animatronics and computer technology. The Creature Shop, internationally recognized as a leader in animatronics, was awarded an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for the film "Babe" in 1996.

"A lot of people don't know that the Creature Shops specialize in animatronic film and TV productions," said Jeff Forbes, Computer and Electronics Supervisor at the Los Angeles Creature Shop. "They think we make the Muppets here, which is incorrect. The Muppets are always made out of our New York Muppet Workshop. The Creature Shops create animatronic characters that range from "APE" in George of the Jungle to the 2000 pound robot in Lost in Space."

Now, with the help of AMD, the Creature Shop has employed computer technology to develop the Henson Digital Performance Studio (HDPS), a cutting-edge workstation which allows puppeteers to control computer-generated versions of the Muppets and other characters.

HDPS is a hardware and software combination that allows a single puppeteer to control the many movements of a computer-generated character. Through this technology, a computer generated character can actually converse "live" with people. Such dynamic, interactive performances can be used for both entertainment and educational purposes where human feedback is important. There are three components of HDPS: mechanical hand controls; a puppeteer control computer and a digital puppet workstation. These controls generate electrical signals analogous to the motion of the performer. In this way, real-world physics are inserted into the system.

Creating the HDPS systems was an enormous technical challenge that required the Creature Shop to design and develop its own custom control system software. A fundamental requirement was fast, powerful, reliable, off-the-shelf CPU's. "It's often difficult to find what you need through research and development alone," said Forbes. "Although we take note of processor speed, benchmarks and reviews, we have to take them with a grain of salt, because the only real test of performance is on our own application running in the hands of our puppeteers."

The Creature Shop's technical team decided to test the available offerings. "When we test a CPU, we're testing it on our own custom hardware and software," said Forbes. "There are no objective benchmarks for unique applications such as ours. But our evaluations were decisive. We saw a better performance with the AMD Athlon™ processor. It offered us a faster performance."

The hardware challenge for the HDPS team of designers and engineers was straightforward. "We needed to optimize our performance control system software to run at its maximum potential." The AMD Athlon processor was the best choice. "They are very, very fast and very, very stable," said Forbes. "And the AMD Athlon processors are very well supported by the operating systems that we run on them. We love 'em."

The Creature Shop now has eight rackmount systems that make up the first four Henson Digital Performance Studios. "The AMD Athlon processors allow us to give our computer graphics performances more subtlety and realism," said Forbes.

Jim Henson's guiding principle always was that the success of a puppet character was 90% due to the quality of the performance. The most exciting element of the HDPS is that it puts overall control of a digital character back into the hands of a single performer, who can control hundreds of character movement with just their two hands.

The mobile HDPS systems can travel anywhere. With a technician at one end of the machine, and a puppeteer/performer at the other, each HDPS can create digital content directly for studio effects departments or live audiences.

With clients like Walt Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios, this breakthrough development by The Creature Shop is poised to reverberate throughout the entertainment industry. A professional animator, using the traditional "key-framing" method, can produce relatively small amounts of animation per workday - usually measured in seconds - and that animation might not have possessed the nuance and spontaneity of the HDPS performance. An HDPS performer is capable of producing five minutes worth of CG performance in five minutes' time. The very first publicly broadcast HDPS performance was produced in two hours.

The HDPS is a breakthrough in the field of Motion Capture, where sensors record the body movement of a live performer, reflecting real world physics. HDPS can be combined with traditional MoCap to provide a complete live, full body CG character that can be interacted with and directed.

At the core of the HDPS design philosophy is the belief that real actors performing on a virtual stage are the future of electronic entertainment. Ultimately, it's what allows the Creature Shop team to deliver something far richer and more entertaining than a "canned" animation moving on a screen. These Henson systems usher in a new era of spontaneity and variety in computer graphics that has not previously been feasible.

AMD is indeed proud to help bring Jim Henson's vision to life for a new generation, using new technology. The AMD Athlon processor-based HDPS has melded two distinct technologies---computer graphics and animatronics---in a way never seen before. "We're proud to have the AMD Athlon processor in there," said Forbes.