Designing Digital Art and Communication Tools Inspired by Traditional Craft
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
Abstract:
The goal of this work is to design and develop computational interfaces that connect users with to creative process with seamless user experience and enable powerful ways of content creation. This thesis presents the design and implementation of four digital art and communication systems - SandCanvas (Chapter 3), Vignette (Chapter 4), Draco (Chapter 5) and SketchStory (Chapter 6). SandCanvas is a digital multi-touch application for real-time storytelling in which an artist dexterously manipulates virtual sand to produce images and animations, inspired by sand animation. Vignette is a style-preserving sketching tool for pen-and-ink illustration with built-in texture synthesis capabilities, preserving traditional workflow and artistic styles by synthesizing from example strokes. Draco is a sketch-based interface that enables users to add rich set of animation effects consisting groups of strokes with co-ordination motion to their drawings, seemingly bringing illustrations to life. SketchStory is a data-enabled digital whiteboard, facilitating 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.