Visual Literacy is becoming more and more important in todays society. Children are being introduced to new cognitive skills involving reading pictures at younger ages. A common place in which people are using visual literacy is through comics! Many people, especially children, find it much easier to read a story with a visual aspect as in comics; there interest is sustained longer and it gives them the opportunity to think about what they are reading and find out how the pictures are connected instead of simply being told how they interelate as in a normal narrative.
A new system, Micrsoft Chat, has taken comics to annother level–using them for online communication. Many apsects of comic generation such as the structure, placement, and orientation of characters and text “balloons,” and the default character gestures and expressions are already set up for the users. The users are able to create their own characters and keywords typed in are use to form the scenes that the characters are placed in.
The program was initially released on Internet Explorer v3.0 in 1996, and was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander together with the Virtual Worlds Group.
You can download and try the program yourself on this informational site!
