Squidgets: Sketch-based Widget Design for Scene Manipulation
This work provides a novel interaction paradigm for direct scene manipulation, benefiting users of graphical software such as animators and designers.
The paper introduces squidgets, a sketch-based UI framework that interprets user strokes to directly manipulate scene parameters, enabling intuitive scene editing. A controlled experiment showed squidgets improved task performance for 2D object translation and deformation compared to traditional methods.
People naturally sketch strokes over graphical scenes to convey scene changes. We propose automatically interpreting these strokes to execute scene changes with squidgets (sketch-widgets), a novel sketch-based UI framework for direct scene manipulation. Squidgets are motivated by the observation that curves resulting from visually abstracting scene elements provide natural handles for the direct manipulation of scene parameters. Additional curves can be defined by users to author custom handles associated with scene attributes. Users manipulate a scene by simply drawing strokes, partially matched against scene curves to select a squidget and interactively control associated parameters. We present an implementation of squidgets within the 3D animation system Maya, showing 2D/3D stroke input to manipulate 2D/3D scenes. We report on a controlled experiment evaluating squidgets on 2D object translation and deformation tasks, and a broader informal study on squidget creation and manipulation.