Reading #27: K-sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad for Novice Animators (Davis)

Comments:
Sam
Summary:
The paper proposes a general-purpose, informal, 2D animation sketching system, called K-Sketch, to help novices create a wide range of animations quickly.

The system began with a lot of user studies, interview with animators and non-animators, which demonstrated the importance of designing a informal animation tool with little time to learn or use. 18 animation operations were proposed by those users. The goal of the system is not only fast, but also powerful. So the system selected 9 operations, which can meet most requirements of users. The system is implemented in C#.

The system is evaluated by three small user studies. All studies indicated that K-Sketch is stronger than PowerPoint in many aspects, except comfort sharing.
Discussion:
It is a good paper to help novice researcher, like me, to conduct a research on human-computer interaction based sketching system. First, conduct a study to know people's requirements. Second, design a system and make a trade-off between functions and computational time. Final, conduct user studies to compare the performance with other tools.

However, for this paper, I treat it more as a technical report, rather than a conference paper. I think for a conference paper, there should be some new ideas. But the paper includes more implementations rather than ideas.