Rubaiat Habib Kazi

SketchStory: Telling More Engaging Stories with Data through Freeform Sketching

Presenting and communicating insights to an audience-telling a story-is one of the main goals of data exploration. Even though visualization as a storytelling medium has recently begun to gain attention, storytelling is still underexplored in information visualization and little research has been done to help people tell their stories with data. To create a new, more engaging form of storytelling with data, we leverage and extend the narrative storytelling attributes of whiteboard animation with pen and touch interactions. We present SketchStory, a data-enabled digital whiteboard that facilitates the creation of personalized and expressive data charts quickly and easily. SketchStory recognizes a small set of sketch gestures for chart invocation, and automatically completes charts by synthesizing the visuals from the presenter-provided example icon and binding them to the underlying data. Furthermore, SketchStory allows the presenter to move and resize the completed data charts with touch, and filter the underlying data to facilitate interactive exploration. We conducted a controlled experiment for both audiences and presenters to compare SketchStory with a traditional presentation system, Microsoft PowerPoint. Results show that the audience is more engaged by presentations done with SketchStory than PowerPoint. Eighteen out of 24 audience participants preferred SketchStory to PowerPoint. Four out of five presenter participants also favored SketchStory despite the extra effort required for presentation.

Draco: bringing life to illustrations with kinetic textures

We present Draco, a sketch-based interface that allows artists and casual users alike to add a rich set of animation effects to their drawings, seemingly bringing illustrations to life. While previous systems have introduced sketch-based animations for individual objects, our contribution is a unified framework of motion controls that allows users to seamlessly add coordinated motions to object collections. We propose a framework built around kinetic textures, which provide continuous animation effects while preserving the unique timeless nature of still illustrations. This enables many dynamic effects difficult or not possible with previous sketch-based tools, such as a school of fish swimming, tree leaves blowing in the wind, or water rippling in a pond. We describe our implementation and illustrate the repertoire of animation effects it supports. A user study with professional animators and casual users demonstrates the variety of animations, applications and creative possibilities our tool provides.

SandCanvas: a multi-touch art medium inspired by sand animation

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. Inspired by this medium, we have developed a new multi-touch digital artistic medium named SandCanvas that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas also goes beyond traditional sand animation with tools for mixing sand animation with video and replicating recorded free-form hand gestures. In this paper, we analyze common sand animation hand gestures, present SandCanvass intuitive UI, and describe implementation challenges we encountered. We also present an evaluation with professional and novice artists that shows the importance and unique affordances of this new medium.

Kitty: sketching dynamic and interactive illustrations

We present Kitty, a sketch-based tool for authoring dynamic and interactive illustrations. Artists can sketch animated drawings and textures to convey the living phenomena, and specify the functional relationship between its entities to characterize the dynamic behavior of systems and environments. An underlying graph model, customizable through sketching, captures the functional relationships between the visual, spatial, temporal or quantitative parameters of its entities. As the viewer interacts with the resulting dynamic interactive illustration, the parameters of the drawing change accordingly, depicting the dynamics and chain of causal effects within a scene. The generality of this framework makes our tool applicable for a variety of purposes, including technical illustrations, scientific explanation, infographics, medical illustrations, childrens e-books, cartoon strips and beyond. A user study demonstrates the ease of usage, variety of applications, artistic expressiveness and creative possibilities of our tool.

Motion Amplifiers: Sketching Dynamic Illustrations Using the Principles of 2D Animation

We present a sketching tool for crafting animated illustrations that contain the exaggerated dynamics of stylized 2D animations. The system provides a set of motion amplifiers which implement a set of established principles of 2D animation. These amplifiers break down a complex animation effect into independent, understandable chunks. Each amplifier imposes deformations to an underlying grid, which in turn updates the corresponding strokes. Users can combine these amplifiers at will when applying them to an existing animation, promoting rapid experimentation. By leveraging the freeform nature of sketching, our system allows users to rapidly sketch, record motion, explore exaggerated dynamics using the amplifiers, and fine-tune their animations. Practical results confirm that users with no prior experience in animation can produce expressive animated illustrations quickly and easily.

Experimental Evaluation of Sketching on Surfaces in VR

Sketching in immersive 3D virtual reality (VR) environments has great potential for a variety of interactive 3D design applications. Precisely sketching the intended strokes in mid-air, however, can be a challenge. In this paper, we present a set of controlled studies to analyze the factors affecting human ability to sketch freely in a 3D VR environment. In our first study, we directly compare traditional sketching on a physical surface to sketching in VR, with and without a physical surface to rest the stylus on. Our results indicate that the lack of a physical drawing surface is a major cause of inaccuracies in VR drawing, and that the effect is dependent on the orientation of the drawing surface. In a second experiment, we evaluate the extent to which visual guidance can compensate for the loss of sketching precision in VR. We found that while additional visual guidance improves positional accuracy, it can be detrimental to the aesthetic quality of strokes. We conclude by distilling our experimental findings into design guidelines for sketching tools in immersive 3D environments.

Energy-Brushes: Interactive Tools for Illustrating Stylized Elemental Dynamics

Dynamic effects such as waves, splashes, fire, smoke, and explosions are an integral part of stylized animations. However, such dynamics are challenging to produce, as manually sketching key-frames requires significant effort and artistic expertise while physical simulation tools lack sufficient expressiveness and user control. We present an interactive interface for designing these elemental dynamics for animated illustrations. Users draw with coarse-scale energy brushes which serve as control gestures to drive detailed flow particles which represent local velocity fields. These fields can convey both realistic and artistic effects based on user specification. This painting metaphor for creating elemental dynamics simplifies the process, providing artistic control, and preserves the fluidity of sketching. Our system is fast, stable, and intuitive. An initial user evaluation shows that even novice users with no prior animation experience can create intriguing dynamics using our system.

DreamSketch: Early Stage 3D Design Explorations with Sketching and Generative Design

We present DreamSketch, a novel 3D design interface that combines the free-form and expressive qualities of sketching with the computational power of generative design algorithms. In DreamSketch, a user coarsely defines the problem by sketching the design context. Then, a generative design algorithm produces multiple solutions that are augmented as 3D objects in the sketched context. The user can interact with the scene to navigate through the generated solutions. The combination of sketching and generative algorithms enables designers to explore multiple ideas and make better informed design decisions during the early stages of design. Design study sessions with designers and mechanical engineers demonstrate the expressive nature and creative possibilities of DreamSketch.

SKUID: sketching dynamic drawings using the principles of 2D animation

Skuid is a sketching tool for crafting animated illustrations that contain the exaggerated dynamics of stylized 2D animations. Skuid provides a set of motion amplifiers which implement a set of established principles of 2D animation. These amplifiers break down a complex animation effect into independent, understandable chunks. Each amplifier imposes deformations to an underlying grid, which in turn updates the corresponding strokes. Users can combine these amplifiers at will when applying them to an existing animation, promoting rapid experimentation. Skuid leverages the freeform nature of sketching, allowing users to rapidly sketch, record motion, explore exaggerated dynamics using the amplifiers, and fine-tune their animations. Practical results confirm that users with no prior experience in animation can produce expressive animated illustrations quickly and easily with Skuid.

ChronoFab: Fabricating Motion

We present ChronoFab, a 3D modeling tool to craft motion sculptures, tangible representations of 3D animated models, visualizing an objects motion with static, transient, ephemeral visuals that are left behind. Our tool casts 3D modeling as a dynamic art-form by employing 3D animation and dynamic simulation for the modeling of motion sculptures. Our work is inspired by the rich history of stylized motion depiction techniques in existing 3D motion sculptures and 2D comic art. Based on a survey of such techniques, we present an interface that enables users to rapidly explore and craft a variety of static 3D motion depiction techniques, including motion lines, multiple stroboscopic stamps, sweeps and particle systems, using a 3D animated object as input. In a set of professional and non-professional usage sessions, ChronoFab was found to be a superior tool for the authoring of motion sculptures, compared to traditional 3D modeling workflows, reducing task completion times by 79%.