Abstract |
2D motion visualization is an area that gains increasing interest as it provides an
abstraction of motion scenes as well as summarization of motion activities. Artists,
designers, and psychologists have explored techniques in which visual media can be
organized to engender a narrative and direct viewer’s attention within a scene. The need
for such visualizations is currently used in many fields such as for illustrating a sport event
in a newspaper, a dynamic experiment in a scientific journal or visualizing a craft process.
Furthermore, 2D motion visuals can convey motion and instructions on printed matter
and physical surfaces, making possible a wide range of applications that involve physical
objects and surfaces (i.e. mixed reality).
Recently, such visualizations have been also explored in the domain of Digital Cultural
Heritage (CH). Heritage Crafts (HCs) have cultural, historical, economical and societal
significance and value and thus they are considered part of our Cultural Heritage.
Nevertheless, HCs are threatened with extinction due to the declining number of
practitioners and apprentices as well as the lack of interest in young age groups. In this
context, motion visualization on static media could be considered valuable for the
preservation of HCs for different purposes, including education, training and leisure.
Existing research works, on 2D motion visualization, are case-specific by exploiting one or
two motion visualization techniques and they mostly address a narrow range of users (i.e.
technology experts). Additionally, existing image editing software have extremely
complicated user interfaces that require training and experience from the end-users.
To that end, this Thesis proposes an approach for motion visualizations inspired by
techniques used in visual arts such as paintings, comics, photography and instruction
manuals. We present MotiVo, a 2D Human Motion Artistic Visualizer (HAVM) editor that
targets the preservation and representation of HCs, by assisting in the semi-automatic
creation of readable visualizations and motion summarizations. The proposed system
produces artistic image depictions of craft processes and techniques to enhance the
educational and presentation value of digital content. The key contributions of the
MotiVo editor are: (1) it exploits multiple motion visualization techniques and creates
artistic results; (2) it is user-friendly, as for the design of the system the minimum
requirements were introduced; (3) it addresses a wide range of end-users (i.e. craftsmen,
museum educators, researchers, academics, craft enthusiasts) and especially to novice
users with no relevant experience in the image editing software community.
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