A New 3-Dimensional Comic Chat Environment for On-line Game Avatars

Chatting is a typical and crucial communication method for on-line gammers. The most popular game chat is based on plain text scripting similar to Internet instant messengers. Chat with word balloons is widely used in 3-D avatar agents in virtual space (e.g., SecondLife, IMVU). The current word balloon method with virtual space agents can be improved by exploiting stylized paper-book comics effects. The contribution of our work is twofold. First, we propose a realistic and unified communication interface that only requires typing text. For example, in our system, if an agent (avatar) wants to talk to other people, then that agent should approach within a audible and readable distance. We can control virtual loudness of the talking voice by controlling the input text. Second, our system successfully expresses background sound effects. That is we can depict chat atmosphere such as cheerful laughing or loud quarrel, without introducing multimedia features, by manipulating 3-D word balloons.