Karl D.D. Willis

Best Presentation Award for 12Pixels at Pervasive

Our paper “12Pixels: Exploring Social Drawing on Mobile Phones” was awarded the Best Presentation Award at the Pervasive 2010 conference in Helsinki. This follows right on the heals of our Tokyo Interactive Ad Award. The project is moving from strength to strength and we will have some more big news in the near future as [...]

Animation & Sequential Art Principles for Handheld Projector Interaction

A paper presented at the Ubiprojection Workshop on Personal Projection at the Pervasive 2010 conference in Helsinki, Finland.

Animation & Sequential Art Principles for Handheld Projector Interaction (PDF 563K). The abstract is as follows:

We present a brief history of historic handheld projection devices and introduce design techniques for handheld projector interaction that draw from the principles of traditional animation and sequential art. Our approach is to utilize the movement of the handheld projector to express the motion and physicality of projected foreground objects. Users interact and control the projected image by moving and gesturing with the handheld projector itself. The overall interaction metaphor, MotionBeam, is applicable in a wide range of scenarios ranging from the behavior of interface elements to interaction with game characters.

12Pixels: Exploring Social Drawing on Mobile Phones

A research paper detailing the release of the 12Pixels drawing system in the Japanese market. The paper was presented at Pervasive 2010 in Helsinki and was awarded the Best Presentation Award.

12Pixels: Exploring Social Drawing on Mobile Phones (PDF 1.2M). The abstract is as follows:

In this paper we present the design and development of 12Pixels, a novel interface, application, and social web service that allows people to create and share drawings directly from a regular mobile phone. We detail the release of 12Pixels as a service in Japan and analyze trends that emerged from user data collected. Our analysis and insights provide useful ground-level experiences with social drawing and mobile content creation.

Alchemy featured in Page Magazine

Bianca Beuttel has compiled a German-language article in Page Magazine about my former research lab at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The article covers the labs ‘Kansei’ research and design works including the Alchemy project. A list of links from the article can also be found at the [...]

Tokyo Interactive Ad Award for 12Pixels

I am pleased to announce that the 12Pixels campaign by Imaginative Inc. was awarded a Bronze prize in the application category of the Tokyo Interactive Ad Awards. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the project! Here are the full details of the prize winners.

MotionBeam: Designing for Movement with Handheld Projectors

'MotionBeam' is an interaction metaphor for handheld projectors that I have been working on with Ivan Poupyrev at Disney Research. The paper below shows our early results and was presented at CHI 2010 in Atlanta, GA.

MotionBeam: Designing for Movement with Handheld Projectors (PDF 216k) / Poster (PDF 244k). The abstract is as follows:

In this paper we present a novel interaction metaphor for handheld projectors we label MotionBeam. We detail a number of interaction techniques that utilize the physical movement of a handheld projector to better express the motion and physicality of projected objects. Finally we present the first iteration of a projected character design that uses the MotionBeam metaphor for user interaction.

Spatial Sketch @ TEI 2010

I just got back from presenting Spatial Sketch at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference at the MIT Media Lab. There were a number of interesting projects, which you can check on the site itself, the TEI blog, and Core77 also has a good article.

Alchemy: Experiments in Interactive Drawing, Creativity, & Serendipity

Alchemy: Experiments in Interactive Drawing, Creativity, & Serendipity (PDF 572k) – A demo paper presented at the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009 Conference in Berkeley, USA. The abstract is as follows: - This paper presents an overview of Alchemy, an experimental drawing application aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new [...]

12Pixels ‘Color’ Released in Japan

A new version of 12Pixels has been released in Japan in association with Sony Style. This version features a whole range of new features including drawing with colour, saving ‘emoji’ for use with Japanese email, and ranking/commenting drawings. Above is a short clip of Ivan and myself promoting 12Pixels on the TV show of Japanese [...]

Spatial Sketch

Spatial Sketchis a software application for creating 3D sketches in physical space and transforming them into real world objects as a series of laser cut slices. The idea is to bridge between physical movement and physical form, exploring the creative possibilities of digital fabrication. The initial iteration shown here demonstrates the design and creation of a lamp shade using gestural movement and its fabrication using a series of radial slices cut from cardboard and acrylic.

Spatial Sketch: Bridging Between Movement & Fabrication (PDF 500k) - A paper presented at the 2010 Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference in Cambridge, MA. The abstract is as follows:

Spatial Sketch is a three-dimensional (3D) sketch application that bridges between physical movement and the fabrication of objects in the real world via cut planar materials. This paper explores the rationale and details behind the development of the Spatial Sketch application, and presents our observations from user testing and a hands-on lamp shade design workshop. Finally we reflect upon the relevance of embodied forms of human computer interaction for use in digital fabrication.

This project was developed as part of the Igarashi Design Interface Project, together with Juncong Lin.