Reviving 1990's Digital Dress-Up Dolls with Smooch
Explore the fascinating world of Kisekae Set System (KiSS), an open specification for digital dress-up dolls from the 1990s, in this 40-minute conference talk from Strange Loop 2022. Dive deep into the inner workings of KiSS, including its custom image format and domain-specific scripting language. Learn how thousands of artists created KiSS dolls over two decades and discover the efforts to revive this defunct format using JavaScript and Haskell. Join Libby Horacek, a software developer and worker-owner at Position Development, as she shares her experience maintaining open-source Haskell libraries and developing Smooch, a browser-based viewer for KiSS dolls. Gain insights into the preservation and modernization of vintage digital art forms and the technical challenges involved in bringing them back to life.