Animating 3D characters using motion capture data requires basic expertise and manual labor. To support the creativity of animation design and make it easier for common users, we present a sketch-based interface DualMotion, with rough sketches as input for designing daily-life animations of characters, such as walking and jumping. Our approach enables to combine global motions of lower limbs and the local motion of the upper limbs in a database by utilizing a two-stage design strategy. Users are allowed to design a motion by starting with drawing a rough trajectory of a body/lower limb movement in the global design stage. The upper limb motions are then designed by drawing several more relative motion trajectories in the local design stage. We conduct a user study and verify the effectiveness and convenience of the proposed system in creative activities.

Recent idea visualization programs still lack automatic idea summarization capabilities. This paper presents a knowledge-based method for automatically providing a short piece of English text about a topic to each idea group in idea charts. This automatic topic identification makes used Yet Another General Ontology (YAGO) and Wordnet as its knowledge bases. We propose a novel topic selection method and we compared its performance with three existing methods using two experimental datasets constructed using two idea visualization programs, i.e., the KJ Method (Kawakita Jiro Method) and mind-mapping programs. Our proposed topic identification method outperformed the baseline method in terms of both performance and consistency.

Expansion of imagination is crucial for lively creativity. However, such expansion is sometimes rather difficult and an environment which supports creativity is required. Because people can attain higher creativity by using words with a thematic relation rather than words with a taxonomical relation, we tried to extract word lists having thematic relations among words. We first extracted word lists from domain specific documents by utilizing inclusive relations between words based on a modifiee/modifier relationship in documents. Next, from the extracted word lists, we removed the word lists having taxonomical relations so as to obtain only word lists having thematic relations. Finally, based on the assumption what kind of knowledge a person can associate when he/she looks at a set of words correlates with how the word set is effective in creativity support, we examined whether the word lists direct us to informative pages on the Web for verifying the availability of our extracted word lists.

This paper gives a model to explain one phenomenon found in the process of creative concept formation, i.e. the phenomenon that people often get trapped in some state where the mental world remains nebulous and sometimes suddenly make a jump to a new concept. This phenomenon has been qualitatively explained mainly by the philosophers but there have not been models for explaining it quantitatively. Such model is necessary in a new research field to study the systems for aiding human creative activities. So far, the work on creation aid has not had theoretical background and the systems have been built based only on trial and error. The model given in this paper explains some aspects of the phenomena found in creative activities and give some suggestions for the future systems for aiding creative concept formation.