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🎭 Submitting Digital Kathputli — here's the story behind it.
When the Config Makeathon was announced, I kept thinking about what I wanted to build. I asked myself one question: "What feeling am I uniquely equipped to digitize?"
The answer came from a childhood memory.
Growing up, I was fascinated by Rajasthani Kathputli — traditional string puppetry that's been alive for over 1000 years. Not just by the puppets, but by the puppeteers. How they gave life to something lifeless using only their fingers.
I wanted to bring that feeling into the browser.
So I built Digital Kathputli — an interactive string puppetry experience where your hand becomes the controller, your fingers become the strings, and anyone can become a puppeteer.
🎪 The experience takes you through:
🎭 A playful onboarding
🪆 Choosing your puppet
🖐️ Performing using live hand tracking
👆 Move your index finger to animate one arm.
🤌 Curl your ring finger to move the other.
✋ Raise your hand to lift the puppet onto the stage.
📸 Strike your favourite pose and download a vintage Rajasthani postcard as a digital souvenir.
🛠️ Built with:
Figma Make — the complete interactive experience
MediaPipe Hand Landmarker — real-time hand tracking
Figma Weave — bandhani-inspired stage, theatre seal, and puppet illustrations
Suno AI — custom Rajasthani folk opening music
GitHub — asset hosting
💡 What I learned
Building this project meant constantly experimenting, breaking things, and iterating.
The biggest challenges were testing every camera interaction on the published site because the Make preview can't access webcams, working around browser audio restrictions, and simplifying an illustrated puppet rig into something that animated smoothly.
The biggest takeaway?
Better context beats more prompts.
🎭 Try the interactive experience: Digital Kathputli.figma.site
🔗Read : X Post
💻 Best experienced on a desktop/laptop with a webcam.
Raj and Rani are ready.
The stage is set. 🎪
nostalgia 😄
I'm so glad it brought back those memories! 🎭
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BABBU
Every toddler invents their own language. Babbu is my daughter Matilda's word for ball. By the time she says it correctly, I'll have already forgotten how it sounded.
Babbu is a private dictionary for the words only your child says, the mispronunciations, the invented names, the sounds that make sense to no one but you. No social features. No accounts. Just a growing archive of a specific, unrepeatable moment in your child's life.
Try it here: https://adobe-slush-93538397.figma.site
✨ What it does
- Add a word as your child says it, plus what it actually means
- Record their voice directly in the app
- Automatically matches an illustration to the word's meaning, translating it from any language
- Colour-code each card
- Search your collection
- Share a snapshot of the full dictionary with family as a single link
🛠️ Built with
Figma Make
Anthropic API — icon matching with automatic translation
Native browser MediaRecorder API — audio recording, no dependencies
localStorage — fully private, lives on your device
🔮 What's next
Live sync so the dictionary stays up to date for everyone
Family members can contribute words from their end
Milestones view — first word, tenth, fiftieth
A printed book of the whole dictionary
This is so wonderful! Did you make the video with Weave?
This project is special to me.
I have shared a lot of WIP videos about it a few months ago and now I am ready to share more details about this amazing framer template.
Perfectly executed
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