2001 Presentations (Communicative Events)

WordsEye: An Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion System

Coyne, Robert Eric; Sproat, Richard

Natural language is an easy and effective medium for describing
visual ideas and mental images. Thus, we foresee the emergence of
language-based 3D scene generation systems to let ordinary users
quickly create 3D scenes without having to learn special software,
acquire artistic skills, or even touch a desktop window-oriented
interface. WordsEye is such a system for automatically converting
text into representative 3D scenes. WordsEye relies on a large
database of 3D models and poses to depict entities and actions. Every
3D model can have associated shape displacements, spatial tags,
and functional properties to be used in the depiction process. We
describe the linguistic analysis and depiction techniques used by
WordsEye along with some general strategies by which more abstract
concepts are made depictable.