Comic Chat: From Research To Product

Comic Chat began as a project at Microsoft Corporation’s new research labs. Our goal was to build a new kind of chat program, that automatically enhanced a textual chat conversation by adding graphics, using conventions adopted from the comics domain. As people type text into Comic Chat, comics panels appear. The program uses traditional comics illustration rules to determine which characters should appear in each panel, how to position them, and a default gesture and expression for these characters. It also computes word balloon outlines that look hand-drawn, and lays out these balloons appropriately in each panel. Comic Chat also decides when to break from one panel to the next, and the zoom factor for each panel. People find Comic Chat appealing, and it has become a successful Microsoft product. It has shipped millions of copies and been localized into 24 different languages. Here we describe many of the research issues surrounding Comic Chat, and some of the lessons that we learned turning the research prototype into a product.