Hapty: A haptically augmented animation tool

Digital tools for creative practices are powerful. However, their power is harnessed through interfaces whose complexity and dependence upon unintuitive means of interaction make them inaccessible to a wide range of skilled practitioners. As a result, a dichotomy has been created between physical creative practices and their digital counterparts, thus preventing skills associated with physical embodiment from exploiting the advantages of digital technologies. This research seeks to explore the design of digital tools for creative use which embody the rich tacit knowledge of physical hand practice. As a case study, we investigate the intuitive employment of physical skill in conventional non-digital physical stop-motion animation and the lack of it in digital animation techniques.