Creating animation with personal photo collections and map for storytelling

Abstract

The goal of our research is to support the sharing of stories with digital photographs. Some map sites are now collecting stories associated with peoples' relationships to places. Users are mapping collections of places including intangible emotional associations of places along with photographs, videos. Though this framework of mapping stories is important for accelerating individual creation and transmission of map content, it is not expressive enough to communicate stories narratively. For example, especially when the number of the mapped collections of places is large, it is not easy for viewers to read the map, and it is not easy for creators to express stories as series of events in the real world. That is because one narrative story in a form of a sequence of text narrations, a sequence of photographs, a movie, and an audio like podcasting, etc. is mapped to just one point. As a result, it's up to the viewers which point on the map to read, and in what order. The common framework is rather suitable for mapping and expressing fragments or snapshots of a whole story, and not suitable for expressing a whole story narratively by using a whole area of a map as the setting of the story. We therefore propose a new framework for mapping personal photo collections and constructing them as stories such as route guidances, sightseeing guidances, historical topics, fieldwork records, personal diaries, and so on. We named this framework as spatial slideshow. A spatial slideshow is a fusion of personal photo mapping and photo storytelling. Each story of a spatial slideshow is made of a sequence of mapped photographs, and presented as synchronized animations of a map and an enhanced photo slideshow. The main technical suggestion of this paper is a method for creating a three-dimensional animation of photo image which has a visual effect of moving from photo to photo. We have developed a personal photo album software and released it on the Web, which works as an editor and a browser of spatial slideshows. We assume the proposed framework has a significance of helping with grassroots development of spatial content driven by visual communications about places or events in the real world.