If the best writing is the kind that engenders mental images, this new app may just turn you into the next Langston Hughes. Now, your readers don’t have to imagine the scene you’re painting via your words — they can actually see it with the naked eye. It’s all thanks to a new app called WordsEye, which allows you to “type a picture.” Available as both a Web and mobile application, the program allows the user to create a digital picture using plain English. “With WordsEye,” its website claims, “you can turn you words into art, visual opinion, greetings, single-panel cartoons, and more.”
The technology behind WordsEye is pretty fascinating, making use of speech tagging and analytics to parse text into a “semantic representation,” which can then be rendered into a 3D image. According to the company’s technology page, their cutting edge process “relies on a large database of linguistic and world knowledge about objects, their parts, and their properties.”
More impressively still, all of WordsEye’s capabilities are stored on their “robust and scalable cloud infrastructure,” which means that you don’t need any software or plug-ins to run the app. And thanks to their “state-of-the art GPU hardware,” all your images will look remarkably sharp, with raytracing producing high-definition and high-quality 3D illustrations.
Lending credence to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words, once a scene is created with WordsEye, the user can then choose different viewing angles, turn it into a 2D images, or even interact with the creation, sharing it with friends and fans everywhere. “Enabling a new form of creative expression is our primary thrust, but we see strong applications in education, mobile messaging, VR, and gaming,” said Gary Zamchicks, WordsEye’s CEO.
While the product is still in beta at present, the future seems bright for WordsEye. After all, who doesn’t want to write a picture book without having to draw the pictures?
