Kitty is a research prototype enabling the creation of dynamic (interactive, animated and responsive) illustrations with a fluid sketch-based interface. This children book illustration captures the dynamics of the scene and changes as a child interacts with it. Art: Rubaiat Habib
"I believe that dynamic pictures will someday be the primary medium for visual art and visual explanations" - Bret Victor.
Kitty is 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. 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.
Design
To specify the interactive behavior of entities, Kitty relies on an underlying relational graph structure, where nodes correspond to the entities and edges represent the functional correspondence between the entities' parameters. Kitty displays this graph in the context of the illustration, and authors can specify edges and their associated functions through freeform sketching. This enables an intuitive interaction, without requiring any programming or scripting.
Sign up!
We intend to bring the power of intricate animation effects and interactive graphics to the creative hands of mass users. Kitty is about to appear in ACM's User Interface and Software Technology Symposium (UIST) 2014. Kitty is a functional research prototype at this moment. For up-to-date information, research outcomes and product announcements, please sign up this form.
Sounds exciting? We are open to ideas, discussion and collaboration with creators. Drop us a line if you are interested.
3 publications
Rubaiat Habib, Tovi Grossman, Nobuyuki Umetani, George Fitzmaurice (2016)
Motion Amplifiers: Sketching Dynamic Illustrations Using the Principles of 2D AnimationCHI 2016 Conference proceedings:
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
10 pages
Rubaiat Habib, Fanny Chevalier, Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice (2014)
Kitty: Sketching Dynamic and Interactive IllustrationsUIST 2014 Conference proceedings:
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology
11 pages
Rubaiat Habib, Fanny Chevalier, Tovi Grossman, Shengdong Zhao, George Fitzmaurice (2014)
Draco: Bringing Life to Illustrations with Kinetic TexturesCHI 2014 Conference proceedings:
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
10 pages