T2V: New Technology of Converting Text to CG Animation

It is common today to see digital content made by nonprofessionals. This is particularly true on the Internet where numerous armature movies can be found in blogs and Social Network Systems such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. and in movie sharing services such as YouTube. However, TV-program-like film clips with high production value are found less frequently. There is still a considerable barrier to the creation of this type of content for non-professionals. Based on this background, we have been developing a technology of producing TV-program-like CG animations (CGA) automatically from text-based script. We call this technology "T2V: Text-To-Vision" (Fig. 1). One of the significant characteristics of TV content is its large variety. The genre of TV programs includes news, drama, reality shows, sports, variety, music, education etc. The TV program production industry has accumulated production methodologies for many years. But these methodologies have not been made readily available to non-industry individuals. Our aims are to open the rich TV program production methodology in the world of UGC (User-Generated-Content). To facilitate this, we have developed a PC application that we call the "T2V Player". This application allows users to create animations instantly by simply typing in text in a customary fashion as when writing on a word processor. This is expected to lower the barrier to the creation of CGA dramatically. The T2V technology is built with the TVML (TV program Making Language) which was proposed by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)1). TVML is designed as a special computer language that describes the content of TV program. A TVML Engine creates the complete CGanimated sequence by integrating real-time CG character Abstract We have developed a technology that enables the creation of TV-program-like CG animation generated automatically from text-based script. We call this technology "T2V (Text-To-Vision)" and have developed a PC application that we call the "T2V Player." The application allows users to create animations instantly by simply typing in text in a customary fashion as when writing on a word processor. The T2V Player employs a unique framework with a capability to accommodate any text processing module to realize any type of text-to-animation conversion. The T2V Player is not only an animation tool for writers creating animations from their texts, but also an application of various text-to-vision services such as automatic animation generation form Web sites and other text sources. This paper describes the concept of T2V and the technical specifications of the T2V Player and its benefits.