Augmenting Conversations With Comic-Style Word Balloons

We propose a novel approach for enabling comic-style conversation in mixed reality to assist face-to-face conversation on-site or remotely. Our approach brings word balloons of comic-style conversation to the real world. The word balloons can adapt to mixed reality scenes, such as the 3-D head motion of the speaker, the comic styles, and the speech. During the conversation, our approach updates the word balloons continuously in the object space and discretely in the image space, guided by a field learned from comics. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies were conducted to evaluate and compare our approach with alternatives. The results from the user study and ablation study demonstrated that our approach turns out to be practical for assisting face-to-face conversation.