idAnimate : supporting conceptual design with animation-sketching

Creating animations is a complex activity that often requires an expert, especially if results need to be obtained under time pressure. As animations are potentially relevant in many different contexts, it is interesting to allow more people to use them for communicating ideas about time-varying phenomena. Multi-touch devices create opportunities to redesign existing applications and user interfaces, and new classes of animation authoring tools that use gestural interaction have therefore started to appear. Most of them focus on specific applications, such as cartoon and puppet animation. This chapter presents idAnimate, a low-fidelity general-purpose animation authoring system for sketching animations on multi-touch devices. With idAnimate, the user can manipulate objects with natural hand gestures while the system records the trajectories and transformations, using them to build animations.