Microsoft’s Comic Chat was an automatic conversation visualizer that used the format of comic books to lay-out text for a chat into a visual story. Taking lessons from Scott McCloud’s seminal book, Understanding Comics, Comic Chat’s designers and engineers, David Kurlander, Tim Skelly, and David H. Salesin, created a deceptively simple system that automatically generated comic-style visual panes in a text-based chat system. As users typed (or, today, perhaps talk), the system would iden...
