LIPSinc Co-Founder Launches New Venture

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC - Donovan Moxey, Ph.D, co-founder of LIPSinc, has recently founded a new company, Interactive Multimedia Solutions Inc. The company has licensed LIPSinc's proprietary voice-to-animation technology and will focus on becoming a provider of automated voice-to-animation products and solutions for the multimedia market. LIPSinc officially ceased operations August 2002, and subsequent to its closing Dr. Moxey reached an agreement with LIPSinc's investors that allowed for the formation of the new company. Under the terms of the agreement, Interactive Multimedia Solutions Inc. (IMS) has access to LIPSinc's core technology and intellectual property, and is able to develop applications and solutions to address opportunities in the growing multimedia market. " I am very excited about this opportunity to essentially re-launch the company I co-founded almost five years ago," says Moxey, "this new company gives me the opportunity to work toward achieving the initial vision that I conceived for the role of automated talking characters in the multimedia market". IMS has current plans to develop five products for the multimedia market. These include three products that are companion products to Macromedia's line of products, including its Shockwave 3D rendering engine, and two multimedia developer kits targeted at application developers. The Company's two multimedia developer kits, the IMS V2A MDK, and the IMS V2A Real-Time MDK are available for licensing, and it plans to release its software tool, IMS CharacterGenerator Studio, for Macromedia Director MX in a few weeks. A demonstration version of this product is available for evaluation on the IMS web site. These products are easy to use, competitively priced, and allow multimedia developers of just about any skill level to efficiently incorporate animate talking characters as part of any presentation or application. The IMS product line is based on a core voice-to-animation technology that can analyze sound files from a live or recorded voice, as well as from a text-to-speech engine, and produce the corresponding facial animation for a 2D or 3D animated character. Characters can be either photo-realistic, or created by hand animation. This engine detects inflections in the voice signal, and generates speech gesture data that is used to automatically drive the eye blinks, eyebrows, and head movements of the animated character in synch with its speech. Voice files can be from either live or recorded human speech, or synthetic speech created using a text-to-speech engine. Users of IMS' products can create presentations and applications for a number of markets including interactive learning for both the corporate and K-12 environments, direct marketing, web design, customer interfacing solutions, entertainment, and multimedia messaging for wireless devices.