Animating Direct Manipulation Interfaces

Bruce H. Thomas
Advanced Computing Research Centre
School of Computer and Information Science
University of South Australia
The Levels, SA, Australia 5095
E-mail: mabht@graceland.Levels.UniSA.Edu.Au

Paul Calder
Department of Computer Science
The Flinders University of South Australia
GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, Australia 5001

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.

Keywords : animation, direct manipulation, graphical interfaces, warp transformation, user interface toolkits, InterViews

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