From a Textual Narrative to a Visual Story.

Much of our daily learning is done through visual information. Visual information is an indispensable part of our life and tends to convey a lot more details than either speech or text. A visual portrayal of a story is generally more appealing and convincing. It is also useful in a variety of applications, such as an accident/crime scene analysis, education and treatment of various psychological or mental disorders like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Some individuals develop PTSD due to their exposure to some dangerous or shocking life experience, such as military conflict, physical or sexual assault, traffic or fire accident, natural disasters, etc. People suffering from PTSD can be treated using Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET), where they are immersed in a virtual environment to face feared situations that may not be safe to encounter in real life. In addition, generated 3D scenes can also be used as a visual aid for teaching children. Since crating 3D context and scenarios for such situations is tedious, time-consuming and requires special expertise in 3D application development environments and software, there is a need for automatic 3D scene generation systems from simple text descriptions. In this paper, we present a new framework for creating 3D scenes from a user-provided simple text. This proposed framework allows us to incorporate motion as well as special effects into the created scenes. In particular, the framework extracts the objects and entities that are present in a given textual narrative as well as spatial relationships. Depending on the description, it then creates either a 3D scene or a 3D scene with corresponding animation. This framework allows creation of a visualization using a set of pre-existing objects using \(Autodesk Maya ^{\textregistered }\) as an implementation environment.