Animation of mapped photo collections for storytelling

Abstract

Our research goal is to facilitate the sharing of stories with digital photographs. Some map websites now collect stories associated with peoples' relationships to places. Users map collections of places and include their intangible emotional associations with each location along with photographs, videos, etc. Though this framework of mapping stories is important, it is not sufficiently expressive to communicate stories in a narrative fashion. For example, when the number of the mapped collections of places is particularly large, it is neither easy for viewers to interpret the map nor is it easy for the creator to express a story as a series of events in the real world. This is because each narrative, in the form of a sequence of textual narratives, a sequence of photographs, a movie, or audio is mapped to just one point. As a result, it is up to the viewer to decide which points on the map must be read, and in what order. The conventional framework is fairly suitable for mapping and expressing fragments or snapshots of a whole story and not for conveying the whole story as a narrative using the entire map as the setting. We therefore propose a new framework, Spatial Slideshow, for mapping personal photo collections and representing them as stories such as route guidances, sightseeing guidances, historical topics, fieldwork records, personal diaries, and so on. It is a fusion of personal photo mapping and photo storytelling. Each story is conveyed through a sequence of mapped photographs, presented as a synchronized animation of a map and an enhanced photo slideshow. The main technical novelty of this paper is a method for creating three-dimensional animations of photographs that induce the visual effect of motion from photo to photo. We believe that the proposed framework may have considerable significance in facilitating the grassroots development of spatial content driven by visual communication concerning real-world locations or events. © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.