|
Originally published on 05/06/2002
This week, Pulse is launching an interesting new product called Veepers, a tool that lets Web designers put very realistic animated talking heads on their sites. As a demo, Pulse did a Veeper of me. Click here to see it.
Fast Facts:
Pulse
www.pulse3d.com
|
| CEO |
Fred Angelopoulos. Last job: SVP of sales, marketing, and support at Hitachi PC.
|
| HQ |
San Francisco, CA |
| Employees |
50 |
| Market |
Emotive interfaces |
| Funding |
$50 million in three rounds. C round lead: Mobius. Not currently raising funds. |
| Profitable? |
Projected by end of 2002 |
Pulse president Mark Yahiro says human-like interface components help build "emotive interfaces" that are well suited to education, customer service, and communications.
It's not the first time a company has tried to add personality to software. There's at least one direct competitor, LifeFX. Neither Pulse nor LifeFX actually send video, so they use a relatively small amount of bandwidth; all a computer needs to display a lifelike talking head is the base image of a face, some software, and either an audio file or good text-to-speech software.
While LifeFX creates the stand-in files as part of its service, Pulse claims that anybody with a digital camera can set up a Veeper in a few minutes. But in fairness I have to note that when I tried to create my own, I ended up with a creepy harelip; the demo I link to in this column was created by Pulse's art department.
Then there's Right Seat Software, whose VoxProxy product lets you put animated characters into PowerPoint presentations. Unlike Pulse and LifeFX stand-ins, VoxProxy stand-ins are cartoonlike -- more cute than realistic. But for training and for kiosks, they do add some emotional presence.
When we think of software with personality, we are reminded of Clippy, the annoying animated paper clip from Microsoft, and his dumber forebear, Microsoft Bob. These early stabs at anthropomorphizing computers showed how hard it is to create an engaging personality in software. For now, it's probably best to not even try. After all, even "computer-generated" animated films (like Shrek) use live humans for the voice acting. See me, hear me: Click here for a Veeper demo of yours truly.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
|
