"A meek endeavor to the triumph" by Sampath Jayarathna

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Reading #27: K-sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad for Novice Animators

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Francisco

SUMMARY

              The authors proposed an informal, 2D animation system called KSketch, the “Kinetic” Sketch Pad. K-Sketch is a pen-based system that relies on users’ intuitive sense of space and time while still supporting a wide range of uses. K-Sketch animations are often rough, but they are still useful in informal situations and as prototypes of formal animations. The goal of this project has not been to design novel interaction techniques but rather to focus on high-level choices about tool features. Thus, the authors conducted field studies to find out how an informal animation tool might be used and whether or not it could be made general-purpose.

From these interviews with nineteen animators and would be animators, authors compiled a library of 72 usage scenarios for an animation system. these results in more detail and describe a novel optimization technique that enable to make K-Sketch’s interface simultaneously fast, simple, and powerful.

            Process begins by reviewing interviews with animators and with non-animators. This is followed by an analysis of the library of usage scenarios collected and a description of interface optimization technique. Since many novice animators wish to do what experienced animators do, the authors began field studies by interviewing eight experienced animators to see how an informal tool would fit in their work process. K-Sketch currently supports all ten desired animation operations: Translate, Scale, Rotate, Set Timing, Move Relative, Appear, Disappear, Trace, Copy Motion, and Orient to Path. 

DISCUSSION

            These results show that K-Sketch’s simple interface has strong benefits. The simplicity of K-Sketch’s interface also meant less practice time was needed before tasks could be performed. These tools allow designers to build prototypes or storyboards of dynamic systems by creating sketches according to conventional visual languages.

3 comments:

Jonathan H. said...

This is a user-oriented system. What I liked was the author took the time and made the effort to conduct extensive user studies to make sure he got the system right. By right, I mean the user liked the system and could use it. Sadly, you don't see many papers that follow the iterative design process to the letter. This is one of the papers that did a good job on that.

Jianjie Zhang said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jianjie Zhang said...

The paper is a good tutorial for novice researchers, like us, to start a design of sketching system. Start an interview first, design functions which meet most requirements of users and finally conduct several user studies to evaluate the performance.

However, I am seeking more new ideas in the paper, but unfortunately just find more implements. I think it is a good technical report, rather than a conference paper.