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.

"Reviving 1990's Digital Dress-Up Dolls with Smooch" by Libby Horacek (Strange Loop 2022)