Sketching Dynamic and Interactive Illustrations (KITTY)

Validation level: 5. CHI, UIST, CSCW and TOCHI paper publication

Drawing illustrations with dynamic and interactive capabilities to make them move a certain direction, have functional relationships, emit and oscillate, and provide interactivity.

Sketching Animation Illustration Drawing Tablet Pen
Publications
Copy Bibtex Kazi, R. H.; Chevalier, F.; Grossman, T.; Zhao, S. and Fitzmaurice, G. W. DRACO: sketching animated drawings with kinetic textures. In SIGGRAPH Posters, 2014.
Also featured in
Storyboard of Functions

Create Visual Entities: Create objects or emitting or oscillating textures. Objects can then be moved and manipulated in the scene. Emitting and oscillating textures refer to different types graphic generating points in the scene (e.g. boiling water, growing flame).

Map Functional Relationships: Define 'logic' that different nodes follow (e.g. egg falls down -> water splashes). The function is split into steps:

  1. Define start and end nodes
  2. Choose parameters
  3. Map functionality

Setting Interactivity: Defining actions that the user can take in the scene to manipulate certain outcomes, and the corresponding reactions the scene presents.

Evaluation
"--- participants rated 4.4 on average for the ease of crafting visual entities (min: 4) and also 4.4 for the ease of specifying functional relationships (min: 4)." (Kazi, Chevalier, Grossman, Fitzmaurice, 2014)
Evaluation
Participants were reasonably quick with completing the tasks. One outstanding error was assumption of interaction being automatically defined.
Highlights:

Ease of animating images versus doing frame-by-frame modifications.
Adding dynamic movement to otherwise straightforward animation of objects.
Sketched objects become reified instruments.
Mapping functionality provides rich polymorphism in that virtually anything can be mapped to manipulate other objects.
Constrained options of use.
Can be appropriated for simple games.

Limitations:

Lack of grouping for nodes - multiple objects cannot be manipulated at the same time.
Timelessness - the interactions and animations have no end or timeline.
Limited reuse.
Discoverability might not be obvious.
No expressivity.