Application of the Text Visualization Technology in Virtual Environments

Texts and images are commonplace in human communication and there are deep connections between them. We often convert images to texts (e.g. describe a painting by texts) and vice versa (e.g. paint a picture from a story), but this simple-to-human task presents a considerable challenge for computer systems. Along with the development of natural language processing (NLP) and computer graphics technologies, researchers consider the possibilities of integrating these two technologies by incorporating the knowledge of human-to-human interaction in improved HCI. It now becomes one of the new research topics in the area of information visualization. This paper reviews the progress of the applications based on the text visualization technology, discusses some issues related to the existing research, and finally presents an outline of our proposed approach to developing a story visualization system.