Personal Media Producer: A System for Creating 3D CG Animation from Mobile Phone E-mail

Abstract

Mobile phone e-mail is increasingly being chosen by consumers as their primary communication tool. Messages exchanged among mobile phone users frequently contain emoticons (smileys) and emoji (pictograms). Some consumers have started to use services that add a relevant animated image to a message. Consumers will start to exchange animated messages if they are available. This paper proposes a method of generating animation sequences from plain text messages without an authoring process. This method utilizes information available in the consumer's ubiquitous computing environment to obtain necessary information not included in the original e-mail. The results of the preliminary evaluation show that a user needs around two minutes to create a one-minute animation using this method, a 3.6 times improvement in creation efficiency over that of a prior method.