Cards-to-presentation on the web: generating multimedia contents featuring agent animations Yukiko I. Nakano a, * , Toshihiro Murayama a , Masashi Okamoto b , Daisuke Kawahara b , Qing Li b , Sadao Kurohashi b , Toyoaki Nishida c a Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Atago Green Hills MORI Tower 18F, 2-5-1 Atago, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-6218, Japan b Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan c Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan Received 1 October 2004; accepted 1 October 2004 Abstract With the goal of supporting the knowledge circulation and creation process in a society, we have studied story-based communication in a network community. On the basis of this research motivation, this paper proposes a web-based multimedia environment called Stream-oriented Public Opinion Channel (SPOC), which enables novice users to embody a story as multimedia content and distribute it on the Internet. The system produces digital camera work for graphics and video clips and automatically generates agent animations according to linguistic information in a text. The findings of our evaluation experiments show that SPOC is easy for novice users to learn and use, suggesting that this system can reduce a user’s cost in creating multimedia content and encourage communication in a network community. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Multimedia content, such as movies and TV news stories, used to be produced solely by the corporate mass media. Thanks to the significant advances in media and network 1084-8045/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2004.10.006 Journal of Network and Computer Applications 29 (2006) 83–104 www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca * Corresponding author. Tel.: C81 3 5404 2871; fax: C81 3 3432 8851. E-mail addresses: yukiko@ristex.jst.go.jp (Y.I. Nakano), tmuraya@ristex.jst.go.jp (T. Murayama), okamoto@kc.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp (M. Okamoto), kawahara@kc.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp (D. Kawahara), liqing@kc.t.u- tokyo.ac.jp (Q. Li), kuro@kc.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp (S. Kurohashi), nishida@i.kyoto.ac.jp (T. Nishida).