Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Tandy W Trower, Ii

Mark H Lucovsky

Christopher J Guzak

Amit Mital

Joseph D Belfiore

Eric D Rudder

David G Campbell

Mark Jeffrey Weinberg

John Wickens Lamb Merrill

Keith W Short

Christopher E Graham

John W Merrill

Steven M Cellini

Steve Capps

Adrian M Wyard

Randall Lee Kerr

Peter M Spiro

Kaviraj Singh

David Vaskevitch

Charles T Fitzgerald

Paul A Maritz

Stephen M Madigan

An animation system provides synchronization services to synchronize actions of two more interactive user interface characters that are displayed simultaneously. The animation services allow applications to make animation requests to control the actions of characters on the display. These actions include playing one of the character's animation sequences and generating speech output with lip-synched animation of the character's mouth. Accessible via script commands or an Application Programming Interface, the synchronization services allow an application to control interaction between two or more characters on the display. Applications can synchronize actions by invoking straightforward commands such as Wait, Interrupt, or Stop. In response to these commands, the animation server synchronizes scheduled actions by halting playback of a character until a specified action of another character completes or halting a specified action of one character after scheduled actions for another character are completed.

Method and system for synchronizing scripted animations

The animation of a speaking character is synchronized with recorded speech by creating and playing a linguistically enhanced sound file. A sound editing tool employs a speech recognition engine to create the linguistically enhanced sound file from recorded speech and a text of the speech. The speech recognition engine provides timing information related to word breaks and phonemes that is used by the sound editing tool to annotate the speech sound data when creating the linguistically enhanced sound file. When the linguistically enhanced sound file is played to produce sound output, the timing information is retrieved to control the animated character's mouth movement and word pacing in the character's word balloon. The sound editing tool additionally provides editing functions for manipulating the timing information. A text to speech engine can use the same programming interface as the linguistically enhanced sound file player to send notifications to the animation, providing prototyping without recorded speech. Since both use the same interface, recorded speech can be incorporated at a later time with minimal modifications.

Synchronizing the moveable mouths of animated characters with recorded speech

An animation method and system generates interactive animation in the foreground of the user interface of the computer. The system generates arbitrary shaped animation that is independent of the background image of the user interface by computing a bounding region for a current animation frame in real time and creating a non-rectangular window to match this bounding region. The system draws the animation to this non-rectangular window, which clips the frame to the bounding region of the graphical object. The system can be used to create interactive animation that is not confined to a rectangular window of a hosting application or a window of the application making the request to playback animation.

Method and system for generating arbitrary-shaped animation in the user

A client server animation system provides services to enable clients to play animation and lip-synched speech output for an interactive user interface character. Through the programming interface of the server, clients can specify both speech and cursor device input that an instance of an interactive user interface character will respond to when the clients are active. Clients can also request playback of animation and lip-synched speech output through this interface. Services can be invoked from application programs as well as web scripts embedded in web pages downloaded from the Internet.

Client server animation system for managing interactive user interface

A system for scrolling during a drag and drop operation is provided wherein the determination of whether to scroll is based on the location of a mouse indicator as well as the speed of the mouse indicator. The system maintains a predetermined threshold that is empirically proven to reliably distinguish as to whether a user wishes to perform a drag and drop operation or whether the user wishes to invoke the automatic scrolling of the present invention. The system determines when the mouse indicator is over a predefined area of a window, compares the speed of the mouse indicator to the predetermined threshold and scrolls the window if the mouse indicator is over the predefined area and the speed is less than the predetermined threshold.

Auto-scrolling with mouse speed computation during dragging

Auto-scrolling during a drag and drop operation

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Woodinville, WA, United States of America

Tandy W Trower, Ii