K-Sketch Home

Project Information

K-Sketch will allow ordinary computer users to create informal animations from sketches. Current tools for creating animation are extremely complex. This makes it difficult for designers to prototype animations and nearly impossible for novices to create them at all. Simple animation systems exist but severely restrict the types of motion that can be represented. To guide the design K-Sketch, we have conducted field studies into the needs of professional and novice animators. These studies showed the wide variety of motions that users desire in informal animations and indicate how to prioritize these types of motion. Our design allows the most important types of motion to be defined with pen gestures, and gives visual feedback for coordination of events.

Demonstration Video (CHI 2008) (QuickTime, 20MB) (Windows Media, 34MB)

Announcements

04.24.08

Download page fixed and email addresses given in the past three weeks were subscribed to ksketch-announce.

04.23.08

We missed the email addresses of everyone who grabbed the software today. If you didn't get an invitation to the mailing list and want to be on it, please try again.

04.16.08

Important update to Alpha 3. File format fixed for users in Europe.

04.04.08

Alpha 3 is released! Bug fixes.

04.01.08

Minor fix to Alpha 2. Please update if you're having trouble loading old files.

03.16.08

Alpha 2 is released!

02.18.08

We are pleased to announce an alpha release of K-Sketch 1.0! Check below for details on how to download and use K-Sketch.

02.14.08

The essentials are now working, but we want to add a few touches before our alpha release. It won't be long now.

01.18.08

Check out the new video below which will be included in the proceedings of the ACM's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). The video gives a preview of the features we've been adding to K-Sketch, such as copying motions and a simpler interface for adding motions on top of each other.

01.03.08

We are very close to finishing our initial release of K-Sketch, and we expect it to be ready within a month. We promise to notify everyone who has expressed interest when the initial version is available.

Developer Information

Sourceforge

Developer Documentation

K-Lector

People

Richard Davis

Project Leader

Brien Colwell

Visiting Researcher

Cy Khormaee

Undergraduate Researcher

Matt Davis

Undergraduate Researcher

Arpi Shaverdian

Undergraduate Researcher

Prof. James Landay

Faculty Advisor

Tools We Use

K-Sketch was developed with a modified version of the Piccolo.NET User Interface Library from the University of Maryland.

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