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Veepers: Messages from animated animals
26 November 2003

If media technology company Pulse 3D gets its way, people will soon be receiving mobile phone calls from their pets and watching David Beckham deliver the daily sports round-up while sitting on the bus.

Early next year, the San Francisco-based company is due to unleash its Mobile Veepers technology in the UK. It is a new kind of wireless application that features talking, moving virtual humans and other characters.

Mobile Veepers enables the user to take a picture, input text using text-to-speech or recorded audio and to create a short, animated film featuring the photograph speaking the inputted words. The animated photo message can then be sent using mobile messaging, e-mail or chat.

In partnership with the Japanese wireless content provider MTI, Veepers will launch in Japan next month, with consumers paying around Y300 (£1.63) in monthly subscription fees for the service.

Pulse 3D and MTI envisage numerous uses for Veepers beyond teenagers zapping animated bunnies yodelling "I love you" to each other. According to Mark Yahiro, Pulse 3D's chief executive, the application can also be used to enhance the delivery of news, stock updates, and other content, as well as mobile marketing and commerce.

"We want people to use the phone as more than a phone," says Mr Yahiro. "It's an entertainment device."

Pulse has been creating web-based animated characters for five years, developing, among other things, a collection of Dutch-speaking goats for beer-maker Grolsch's The Goat Is Loose! web advertising campaign and a virtual version of Tonight Show host Jay Leno for television network NBC.

With the gradual emergence of 3G networks and the growing popularity of multimedia phones, Mobile Veepers appears on the market at an opportune moment. According to wireless industry analysts ARC Group, 130m multimedia phones will be sold globally by 2005, a figure which is expected to reach 210m by 2008.

Studies on the use of virtual characters (avatars) also point to a thriving future for Veepers-like technologies. Stanford University research on the impact of avatars on Dell Computer's website shows that users who interact with avatars are twice as likely to buy online and three times more likely to give personal information than those who do not.

"Photo-realistic characters have the potential to be bigger than ring-tones among consumers," says Chris Shipley, executive director of the DEMOmobile wireless conference.

According to Mr Yahiro, Veepers has numerous advantages over other multimedia technologies. Content can be dynamically updated by the user, without needing to "re-shoot" scenes, and text can be delivered in multiple languages. The technology supports formats including 3GP (compressed MP4 video) and Java. And the 50Kb files take up less space than video.