Lagniappe

As a child in the early 2000s, I have vivid memories of sitting in the back room of my Nana's house, spending hours playing a computer game. It was a French website featuring a dancing skeleton. I could move the skeleton around with the mouse and click on different features that made it transform in all sorts of strange ways: it could become an X-ray, have dislocated joints, behave as though gravity did not exist, or even mutate until it no longer had a skull.

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While working on my Master's project, I happened to remember that strange little website and wondered whether it still existed. According to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the first available snapshot dates to January 21, 2005, while the most recent web crawl is from March 2, 2022. Traffic to the site had become extremely low by around 2010, and the original site is no longer readily accessible.

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Naturally, I decided to see if I could bring it back.

 

I was able to recreate the website and get my own local version of the skeleton running again. It was a surprisingly satisfying full-circle moment: as a kid, I spent hours playing with a virtual skeleton, and now, as a graduate student, I spend my time studying and reconstructing human movement.

 

Apparently, I never really stopped playing with skeletons. I just turned it into research.

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For anyone who is interested, I have also posted the GitHub repository with the recreated website so that others can download it and play with it themselves.