Kitty: Sketching Dynamic Illustrations (UIST 2014)

“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.

comicstrip — *A dynamic comic strip (authored with Kitty) illustrates the changes in the scene as the viewer interacts with the plant and clock*

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.

Sketching a path between the source object node (the egg) and the target emitting texture node (soup splash), creates a relation between the two visual entities. Upon creation, the relation control widget (radial menus and mapping function widget) are made visible. The artist selects the parameters for the relation, then directly sketches the mapping function. The splash then occurs only when the egg hits the surface. The cat is drawn in likeliness of Simon't Cat, used with permission. — Sketching a path between the source object node (the egg) and the target emitting texture node (soup splash), creates a relation between the two visual entities. Upon creation, the relation control widget (radial menus and mapping function widget) are made visible. The artist selects the parameters for the relation, then directly sketches the mapping function. The splash then occurs only when the egg hits the surface. The cat is drawn in likeliness of Simon’t Cat, used with permission.

*An animated infographic illustrating the weather of a cold windy week in Toronto. The relational functions are generated from an underlying weather data file.*

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. Visit the official project page here.

Publication:

Kitty: Sketching Dynamic and Interactive Illustrations
R H Kazi, F Chevalier, T Grossman, G Fitzmaurice
UIST 2014
People’s Choice Best Talk Award**
Invited to SIGGRAPH 2015 UIST reprise session**