[This post is for answering press inquiries about our SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 paper titled “autocomplete hand-drawn animations”.]
On August 2014, Koji Yatani (at the University of Tokyo) asked me (on Facebook!) to recommend students for a MSR Asia internship under Takaaki Shiratori with topics in animation and sketch UI. I recommended my HKU PhD student Jun Xing, who just got a paper in SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 titled “autocomplete painting repetitions”.
(Both Koji and I were with MSR. That is how we got to know each other even though we have no overlap.)
Our initial goal was to help users create animated emoji in instant messaging. I wanted to make sure the project is significant enough (e.g. for SIGGRAPH) while leveraging our collective expertise as much as possible. Thus, I proposed to extend the aforementioned SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 paper, which can autocomplete only single-frame drawings, for multi-frame animations. The main goal for both projects is to help ordinary users draw as easily and effectively as possible.
(My dad is an artist, but I have yet to learn how to draw. So as any decent computer scientist would do, I ask algorithms for help.)
Jun designed most of the user interface and algorithms, and implemented the entire system. He is definitely one of the best students I have worked with.
We plan to ship prototypes of the system to gather user opinions for further research and improvements, starting with mobile apps followed by desktop versions.
PS:
Contrary to what some press reported, this is NOT a Microsoft technology or product (at least not at this moment of writing). None of the authors were with Microsoft during the key stages of the project development. In particular, the core ideas were conceived before the start of the internship, and Jun had to come back to HKU to finish the project after Takaaki left Microsoft about 1 month before the paper deadline.
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