K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators (Paper Report)

Bibliography:

Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, and James A. Landay. 2008. K-sketch: a 'kinetic' sketch pad for novice animators. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 413-422. DOI=10.1145/1357054.1357122 

Link:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357122

Summary:

This paper describes a tool that allows 'non-animators' to intuitively create animations. The main focus of this tool is to make animation accessible to the novice. Ease of use and design that followed the users intuition were an emphasis. Teachers hoping to use animation in storytelling as well as engineers desiring to sketch-up a prototype of a concept, such as the motion of a robots treads over obstacles, comprise a few of the 'non-animators' this tool aims to assist. Both 'animators' and 'non-animators' alike were surveyed to discover the minimal set of operations that needed to be implemented to complete the most number of relevant tasks.

The system allows users to sketch objects on the virtual canvas and translate, rotate, and scale that object through time through an onscreen widget that appears over the object once selected.. To transform an object the user must first select it and, while holding the alt-key, click and either move, rotate, or scale the object in time. And as long the mouse button is held down, time will advance and the object will follow the action created by the mouse. Other features include erasing the object at a certain point in time, creating new objects in time, copying the motion of one object to the other, adding relative motion to the objects frame of reference, and allowing the object to follow in the direction of the sketched path.

The system was tested by asking the users to complete a set of tasks with the K-Sketch system and with the more technical Power Point animation system. Users reported that the K-Sketch system was more natural and easier to use, and they were more willing to animate and show their animations in front of an audience as opposed to with Power Point.

Comments:

I wasn't sure how the system worked until I saw the demonstration videos at http://www.k-sketch.org/. I think the system works great and is exactly what they were going for. The interface looks intuitive and easy to use. It was discussed in class and I also agree that it would be nice to add physic based animation to the tool set.

Ideas for Research:

This paper as well as the discussions in class gives me an idea extending the animation system to include physical simulations like having rigid bodies collide and break and attaching objects together with spring like forces.