Abstract
If judiciously applied, animation techniques can enhance the look and feel of computer applications that present a graphical human interface. Such techniques can smooth the rough edges and abrupt transitions common in many current graphical interfaces, and strengthen the illusion of direct manipulation that many interfaces strive to present. To date, few applications include such animation techniques. One possible reason is that animated interfaces are difficult to implement: they are difficult to design, place great burdens on programmers, and demand high-performance from underlying graphics systems.This article describes how direct manipulation human computer interfaces can be augmented with techniques borrowed from cartoon animators. In particular, we wish to improve the visual feedback of a direct manipulation interface by smoothing the changes of an interface, giving manipulated objects a feeling of substance and providing cues that anticipate the result of a manipulation. Our approach is to add support for animation techniques such as object distortion and keyframe interpolation, and to provide prepackaged animation effects such as animated widgets for common user interface interactions.To determine if these tools and techniques are practical and effective, we built a prototype direct manipulation drawing editor with an animated interface and used the prototype editor to carry out a set of human factors experiments. The experiments show that the techniques are practical even on standard workstation hardware, and that the effects can indeed enhance direct manipulation interfaces.
- BAECKER,R.AND SMALL, I. 1990. Animation at the interface. In The Art of Human- Computer Interface Design. B. Laurel Ed., Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.Google Scholar
- CARD, S. K., ROBERTSON,G.G.,AND MACKINLAY, J. D. 1991. The information visualizer, an information workspace. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Information Visualization. ACM, New York, NY, 181-188. Google Scholar
- CARD, S. K., ROBERTSON,G.G.,AND YORK, W. 1996. The webbook and the web forager: An information workspace for the world-wide web. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, Canada, April). ACM, New York, NY, 111-117. Google Scholar
- CHANG, B.-W. AND UNGAR, D. 1993. Animation: From cartoons to the user interface. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Animation/Visualization. ACM, New York, NY, 45-55. Google Scholar
- CHATTY, S. 1992. Defining the dynamic behavior of animated interfaces. In Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. IFIP TC2/WG2.7 Working Conference, Vol. A-18 (Ellivuori, Finland, 10-14 Aug.), 95-111. Google Scholar
- CHATTY,S.AND BEAUDOUIN-LAFON, M. 1992. Integrating animation with interfaces. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'92 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Posters and Short Talks. ACM, New York, NY, 70. Google Scholar
- DONSKOY,M.AND KAPTELININ, V. 1997. Window navigation with and without animation: a comparison of scroll bars, zoom, and fisheye view. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'97 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, S. Pemberton Ed., Volume Extended Abstracts (March), ACM, New York, NY, 279-280. Google Scholar
- GONZALEZ, C. 1996. Does animation in user interfaces improve decision making. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, Canada, April). ACM, New York, NY, 27-34. Google Scholar
- HUDSON,S.E.AND STASKO, J. T. 1993. Animation support in a user interface toolkit: Flexible, robust and reusable abstractions. In Proceedings of the ACMSymposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Animation/Visualization. ACM, New York, NY, 57-67. Google Scholar
- LAUREL, B. 1991. Computers as Theatre. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Google Scholar
- LAYBOURNE, K. 1979. The Animation Book. Crown, New York, NY.Google Scholar
- LINTON, M. A., VLISSIDES,J.M.,AND CALDER, P. R. 1989. Composing user interfaces with Inter- Views. IEEE Computer, 8-22. Google Scholar
- MACKINLAY,J.D.,ROBERTSON,G.G.,AND CARD, S. K. 1991. The perspective wall: Detail and context smoothly integrated. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, 173-179. Google Scholar
- ROBERTSON,G.G.,CARD,S.K.,AND MACKINLAY, J. D. 1989. The cognitive coprocessor architecture for interactive user interfaces. In Proceedings of the ACMSymposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 3D/Gesture (Nov.). ACM, New York, NY, 10-18. Google Scholar
- ROBERTSON,G.G.,MACKINLAY,J.D.,AND CARD, S. K. 1991. Cone trees: Animated 3D visualizations of hierarchical information. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Information Visualization. ACM, New York, NY, 189-194. Google Scholar
- STASKO, J. T. 1991. Using direct manipulation to build algorithm animations by demonstration. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI'91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Programming by Demonstration. ACM, New York, NY, 307-314. Google Scholar
- SUKAVIRIYA, P. 1988. Dynamic construction of animated help from application context. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software. (Nov.). ACM, New York, NY, 190-202. Google Scholar
- SUKAVIRIYA,P.AND FOLEY, J. D. 1990. Coupling a UI framework with automatic generation of context-sensitive animated help. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Automatic Generation II (Nov.). ACM, New York, NY, 152-166. Google Scholar
- THOMAS, B. H. 1998. Animating direct manipulation in human computer interfaces. Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Computer Science, The Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia.Google Scholar
- THOMAS, B. H., CALDER,P.,AND DEMCZUK, V. 1998. Experiments with animating direct manipulation in a drawing editor. In ACSC'98" The 21st Australasian Computer Science Conference (Perth, Australia, Feb.), 157-168.Google Scholar
- THOMAS,B.H.AND CALDER, P. R. 1994. Using animation to enhance look and feel. Tech. Rep. CIS-94-014 (Sept.), School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia.Google Scholar
- THOMAS,B.H.AND CALDER, P. R. 1995a. Animating direct manipulation interfaces. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Pittsburgh, PA, Nov.), ACM, New York, NY, 3-12. Google Scholar
- THOMAS,B.H.AND CALDER, P. R. 1995b. Animating widgets in the InterViews toolkit. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1015. Springer Verlag, New York, NY, 169-175. Google Scholar
- THOMAS,B.H.AND CALDER, P. R. 1996. Animating indirect manipulation in direct-manipulation editors. In Proceedings of the Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group of the Ergonomics Society of Australia, OZCHI'96 J. Grundy and M. Apperley Eds. (Hamilton, New Zealand, Nov.), Ergonomics Society of Australia, 184-188. Google Scholar
- THOMAS,B.H.AND DEMCZUK, V. 2000. Evaluation of animation effects to improve indirect manipulation. In Proceedings of the First Australasian User Interface Conference (Canberra, Jan.), IEEE, New York, NY, 110-117. Google Scholar
- THOMAS,F.AND JOHNSTON, O. 1984. Disney Animation: The Illustion of Life. Abbeville Press, New York, NY.Google Scholar
- TRICHINA, E., THOMAS,B.,AND OINONEN, J. 1997. Visualization of data dependency analysis in parallel program design. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Multimedia Information Systems (ICMIS 97, Motorola University, Schaumburg, IL, April).Google Scholar
- VLISSIDES, J. M. 1990. Generalised graphical object editing. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Google Scholar
- VLISSIDES,J.M.AND LINTON, M. A. 1990. Unidraw: A framework for building domain-specific graphical editors. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 8, 3 (July), 237-268. Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Applying cartoon animation techniques to graphical user interfaces
Recommendations
Supporting cartoon animation techniques in direct manipulation graphical user interfaces
If judiciously applied, the techniques of cartoon animation can enhance the illusion of direct manipulation that many human computer interfaces strive to present. In particular, animation can convey a feeling of substance in the objects that a user ...
Visual programming for animation in user interfaces
VL '95: Proceedings of the 11th International IEEE Symposium on Visual LanguagesWe present the visual programming features of the HandMove system, which creates independent animated elements to be integrated in user interfaces constructed with a classical interface builder. Its underlying model is based on path-oriented animation, ...
The role of hand-drawn animation in Disney's Moana
SIGGRAPH '17: ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 TalksThe art direction of Moana called for the use of hand-drawn animation to be intimately mixed with the primarily CG film. This direction pushed us to develop new workflows in order to not only achieve the very specific look but also allow for the direct ...
Comments