News

Amaze Entertainment Chooses IMS LIPGen(TM) as their Facial Animation Solution

Automated Voice-to-Animation SoftwareTool will Allow Amaze to Cost-effectively Create High-quality Facial Animations

Research Triangle Park Area, N.C. (July 2, 2003) - Interactive Multimedia Solutions, Inc. (www.IMS3D.com), a leading provider of voice-to-animation solutions for the multimedia market, is pleased to announce that Amaze Entertainment has licensed IMS LIPGenTM for its KnowWonder Studio.  KnowWonder is best known for creating popular PC games such as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Finding Nemo." KnowWonder will use the IMS LIPGenTM application to create facial animations for a number of high-profile games currently under development.

"Having a company like Amaze Entertainment as a key customer of ours is a strong indication of the level of quality of our products," says Donovan Moxey, Ph.D., founder & CEO of IMS.  "The IMS LIPGenTM product easy to use, and can be integrated into any game development production process. This product saves significant time and money for game developers that have to animate significant amounts of dialog."

IMS LIPGenTM is a batch processing animation tool that takes a recorded voice, and automatically creates precise mouth, jaw, and lip position data. The audio files can be in any language, and recorded by a human, or generated by a text-to-speech (TTS) engine.  The core voice-to-animation engine that is the basis the IMS LIPGenTM was trained on English, but because of its unique proprietary co-articulation algorithm, quality results have been generated for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and a number of other languages. This is a significant time and cost-savings advantage for game developers that localize their game titles for multiple markets. IMS LIPGenTM also produces corresponding automated speech gestures that are generally associated with speaking including head, eye, eyebrow movement, and eye blinks.  These automated speech gestures in combination with the lip synchronization data can be use to automatically animate secondary game characters without the need for additional tweaking, saving significant time and production costs.  .

"IMS LIPGenTM is a very effective tool"," says Liz Lehmans, Producer for KnowWonder.  "This product gives us the ability to efficiently and inexpensively integrate an automated facial animation software tool into our existing production process.  IMS LIPGenTM delivers excellent quality lip synchronization and gives us the opportunity to focus on other aspects of game development rather than spend time hand-synching dialog files."

IMS LIPGenTM has a command line interface feature that allows it to be easily integrated into any production process.  With this functionality, voice files can be processed on a central server, and the corresponding animation data files made available to animators and game developers sharing the network.  Additionally, the flexibility of the data from IMS LIPGenTM allow it to be used in both commercial and proprietary animation software tools. The IMS LIPGenTM product is licensed to game development studios on a per/title per/platform basis, or as a site license. A product specification sheet for IMS LIPGenTM is available from the IMS web site (www.IMS3D.com). A free evaluation licenses for the product is available by contacting IMS directly.

About IMS
Interactive Multimedia Solutions, Inc. (IMS) is a multimedia software and solutions company focused on developing and delivering innovative software solutions that allow for the seamless integration of interactive animated talking digital characters as part of multimedia presentations to be delivered via the web or as part of a DVD/CD-ROM.  The software solutions developed by IMS can be applied across a number of markets including the Internet, Direct Marketing, Computer Based Interactive Training, Entertainment, and Interactive Kiosk systems. More information on the IMS suite of products and solutions is available at www.IMS3D.com.  

About KnowWonder and Amaze Entertainment
KnowWonder is the PC game studio of Amaze Entertainment, one of the world's largest independent developers of interactive entertainment.  Through its four unique studios, Adrenium Games, The Fizz Factor, Griptonite Games and KnowWonder, the company creates high-quality games for virtually every platform -- from popular handheld devices and PCs to today's advanced game consoles.  Recognized for creating top-selling titles, KnowWonder is an expert at developing exceptionally fun and exciting games built on the most popular entertainment brands.  For more information about KnowWonder and Amaze Entertainment, visit www.knowwonder.com and www.amazeentertainment.com.