A PlayMail™ Animation from  

Look fuzzy? D ownload It!  PCs:right-click here, Macs: click-and-hold here. 2.86 Mb in size.

In either case, you'll need the capability to play RealPlayer files.

Read About It:  How it was made.

Ponder It:  Why it was made.

The Image:      Back to the top.

Fruit Colored Rings was made using the amazing face animation and text-sync technology being developed at AT&T's Research Lab. Visit the site and establish your own account for endless fun: http://playmail.research.att.com/ModelAdaptation/index.html .

    Research Laboratories

Here's the original image I submitted to create the "mail".
(For more on that, see The Message, below):

As you may be able to tell, the AT&T software / site did an impressive job animating the face and moving it atop the stable body and against the background. The only strange glitch is the mouth's interior, but that's common to all PlayMail at this time and is hardly noticeable.

I did some experimenting and found that this nearly three-quarters view works better for the animation than PlayMail's recommended parameters of eyes dead-on and face filling the frame like a monstrous pumpkin. I also made generous use of the emoticons to script some movement and expression.

By the way, this is the size of the picture as submitted, but you can vary that reliably, too.

The Message:      Back to the top.

I experienced (some might say "suffered") an epiphany upon encountering the delicious product available at my neighborhood grocer's known as " Chef Maxwell's Fruit Colored Rings ". They are a delectable product from Mexico featuring colors normally found outside of Nature.

Note the sine qua non of this confection: Fruit Colored Rings. Chef Maxwell had sized-up the world of breakfast cereals and came-- quite rightly-- to the conclusion that color and taste are one and the same. Why be concerned with making fruit flavored rings when you can be wowed by Fruit Colored Rings?

Obviously, Chef Maxwell must be a Mexican shaman who knows the valuable experiences synaesthesia can teach. And so we "taste" these fantastic fruits of another realm through their color. And what colors! I'm not certain the FDA would approve.

After a few bowls, the Chef's mighty malted rings brought me to another world. It was there that Samuel Coleridge handed me a pulsing bowl of verse scented squares to guide me through this new domain. I was about to ask him more concerning Fruit Colored Rings, but just then Milton Friedman knocked on the door to demand the $20 he had loaned Coleridge. It was at this time that Lewis Carroll spoke to me in the voice of Archie Bunker about the importance of seafood handling safety before launching into a poem. It was difficult to hear him above the elderly economist's shouting, and so he slowly began to slide the volume control up, but that only somehow or other signalled John Denver to come in and cry us a song.

With a start I awoke on my floor face-down in a bowl of multicolored milk. Quickly grabbing keyboard and mouse, I transcribed the poem. It was then the friendly men in white coats came to offer me an ice cream treat at Bellvue. With some effort to work around the limits of the straightjacket, I poured the poem into the PlayMail interface and so I'm able to share the vision of the tasty hues of Chef Maxwell's Fruit Colored Rings with the world.