Animation Generation for Chinese Character Learning on Mobile Devices

There are many difficulties to develop a mobile contents due to many constraints on mobile environments. It is difficult to make a good mobile contents with only visual reduction of existing contents on wire Internet. Therefore, it is essential to devise the data representation and to develop the authoring tool to meet the needs of the mobile contents market. We suggest the compact mobile contents to learn Chinese characters and developed its authoring tool. The animation which our system produces is realistic as if someone writes letters with pen or brush. Moreover, our authoring tool makes a user generate a Chinese character animation easily and rapidly although she or he has not many knowledge in computer graphics, mobile programming or Chinese characters. The method to generate the stroke animation is following: We take basic character shape information represented with several contours from TTF(TrueType Font) and get the information for the stroke segmentation and stroke ordering from simple user input. And then, we decompose whole character shape into some strokes by using polygonal approximation technique. Next, the stroke animation for each stroke is automatically generated by the scan line algorithm ordered by the stroke direction. Finally, the ordered scan lines are compressed into some integers by reducing coordinate redundancy As a result, the stroke animation of our system is even smaller than GIF animation. Our method can be extended to rendering and animation of Hangul or general 2D shape based on vector graphics. We have the plan to find the method to automate the stroke segmentation and ordering without user input.