As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation (awesome video)
youtube.com
youtube.com
Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh," which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ at around 7:30.
I work in the same lab as Tomer who did this paper, Big Ups Tomer!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DJQ9PuT4I8
We didn't win, but my wife (the director) did get a personalized bottle of ketchup out of the deal.
If you want to see more of the Puppet tool, there's a tutorial here: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_af...
Video of puppet tool in use start around minute 2:45
It's beautiful that they chose rigidity too -- it is an extremely natural behavior that most biological things would default to. And it's great fun to play with!
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/innovation/smart-scene-carving-re...
[The PDF is here.](http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/rigid.pdf)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197781
And here it is. Nice.