Supporting cartoon animation techniques in direct manipulation graphical user interfaces

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 describes algorithms and implementation issues to support cartoon style graphical object distortion effects for direct manipulation user interfaces. 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.