Animating direct manipulation interfaces

Abstract

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 manipulates, strengthening the sense that real work is being done. This paper suggests some techniques that application programmers can use to animate direct manipulation interfaces, and it describes tools that programmers can use to easily incorporate the effects into their code. Our approach is based on suggesting a range of animation effects by distorting the view of the manipulated object. To explore the idea, we added a warping transformation capability to the Interviews user interface toolkit and used the new transformation to build a simple drawing editor that uses animated feedback. The editor demonstrates the effectiveness of the animation for simple operations, and it shows that the technique is practical even on standard workstation hardware.

2D Shape Deformation Based on Positional Constraints and Layer Manipulation

“…These methods proved to be very important in many applications, such as enrichment of graphical interfaces [1], character animation [2]and image editing. Techniques for 2D deformation are particularly appealing when applied in a character animation context, enabling the artist to obtain several poses for the same character without redrawing.…”

Acquisition of Animated and Pop-Up Targets

“…More recently, GUIs have also started to feature animated targets that move while the pointing gesture is being performed, e.g., the windows in Mac OS X Exposé. While we know that animation enhances user interaction with the system [13,24] by providing a continuous feedback that increases the user's sense of direct and indirect interaction [26], its effect on pointing has not, to the best of our knowledge, been studied. In particular, beyond the empirical evidence that users take advantage of their knowledge of the behavior of targets to anticipate their apparition or final position, we are not aware of any systematic study of this phenomenon.…”

Warping to enhance 3D user interfaces

“…This new class defined to represent a set of warp vectors. This new class is an extension of the 2D version defined in [8]. The remained of the section provides an overview of the warp transformation.…”

“…With techniques like these, an application can create the illusion of a greater sense of substance for its objects while still allowing users to feel that they are in control. The overall effect is that the user has a stronger sense of progress being made [8]. Figure 1 shows a 3D direct manipulation move applied to a square.…”

“…This paper presents an extension to joint research conducted with Paul Calder in the area of animating direct manipulation interfaces [8]. The original work concentrated on animation effects for visual feedback in 2D user interfaces, whereas this paper presents work which extends these animation effects to 3D interfaces.…”