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Welcome to Microsoft Comic Chat 1.0!

Comic Chat is a new kind of graphical chat program developed at Microsoft. As users type text into Comic Chat, a comic strip unfolds showing the various participants in the conversation as comic characters, and their utterances in word balloons.

On the fly, each Comic Chat client automatically determines a number of aspects related to comics generation. These include:

  • Which characters to place in each panel
  • The gestures and expressions for these characters
  • Where the characters should be placed, and how they should be oriented
  • The outline form of each word balloon
  • The layout of word balloons in the panels
  • When to move on to a new panel
  • What zoom factor to use for each panel
These decisions take less than a second a panel, and the result is a comic strip that aesthetically represents the conversation.


Comments? E-mail: comichat@microsoft.com.
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