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Monday Sep 8, 2008
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Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
-H.M. Warner, founder of Warner Brothers
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Animation PlayerTwinACT has developed a proprietary animation player in Macromedia Flash for displaying animated interactive characters within a standard Web browser. Macromedia Flash uses a vector graphics format that allows animations to be morphed and sized without affecting the image quality. The player is extremely lightweight and most online users (more than 95%) are able to view the character animations without needing to download any software.
Used in conjunction with dynamic text displays, TwinACT's Interactive Characters use speech effectively to engage users and to clearly communicate information. The Animation Player plays streaming behavior files that utilize a proprietary format that includes synchronized tracks of words, animation cues and voice audio. The behavior files can be generated on-the-fly using computer synthesized text-to-speech (TTS) or they can be pre-compiled using either TTS voices or pre-recorded human speech.
Character Animations
Research suggests that interactive characters offer a very natural and highly-engaging interface to information systems. All human beings are hardwired to respond to the presence of a human face and to the sounds of spoken language.
By using high quality 2-D cartoon characters with animations that mimic human behaviors, TwinACT strikes a optimal balance with characters that are friendly, readily accepted by users and instantly recognizable. TwinACT's Interactive Characters use realistic animations to reinforce their conversational interactions. The characters blink, breath, look around, make eye contact and respond with appropriate facial expressions.
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