Recco: Online Comics Retrieval and Creation

Recco is the abbreviation of Ricardo Lopes’s Master Thesis. Over the last year and half he has worked hard on his thesis to create something cool and innovative. And he aced it with a grade of 19 from 20! His thesis was about creating comics and using sketch retrieval techniques to reuse elements. On user tests we were able to prove the technology and the results were very satisfying.
In terms of innovation, although having a full SVG editor to create comics online is already very innovative, but our main contribution to science and technology were Calitags (or sketch-tags) which I’ll talk more in a future post. In a nutshell, Calitags the same as regular tags, but instead of words you tag things with drawings, gestures or just any doodle. This is more natural to artists and for a sketch/draw interface/editor. It takes advantage of your visual memory and allow you to associate your own abstractions to content, by drawing ideas or concepts. Well, more on this later…

As for elements reuse, one thing that we thought we knew and that Ricardo proven was that in comic creation, one of the most important tasks is repetition, artists reuse a lot of elements like, backgrounds, characters, objects, balloons and other comic universal elements. So, in the next version of Comics Sketch, we will allow them to store any element or drawing and use Calitags to retrieval them.

Enough talk, where are two demo videos with a small preview of Ricardo’s thesis application.
This will be most certainly a starting point for the new comic’s editor on Comics Sketch. Expect a lot of new other cool features… till then, just comment on these ones:

The above video does a quick overview of the thesis application. The one bellow shows a simple strip creation:

Here is his thesis presentation.. it’s very Zen, but in Portuguese though:

Congratulations Ricardo!!!