Pulse Entertainment, the company that brought you Virtual Jay Leno on NBC's Tonight Show Web site, Tuesday launched a handful of new applications designed to make browsing a little more real.

The San Francisco-based 3-D Web animation software company, unveiled a "virtual personality technology suite" to work with its Pulse Animation Studio software.

At SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles this week, Pulse is demonstrating the software and its ability to take a single 2D photo of a human face, convert it to a photoreal 3D model, use text-to-speech or direct audio input along with automatic lip-synching, and produce a fully-functional virtual clone in less than 5 minutes. The process used to take hours or even days.

"When it comes to communicating via the Internet, most forms of correspondence are still text-based, with a sprinkling of two-dimensional graphics," says Pulse president Mark Yahiro. "From e-mail and instant messaging to public and private Web sites, virtual characters will breathe new life into the gamut of staid, static communications. When you visit a Web site or read an email or instant message, what's universally absent is personality. We're delivering that key missing ingredient."

The suite is available but does not have a price tag as of yet.

The company is also showcasing its Pulse Sonifier, an audio technology designed to let users simply drag and drop audio elements onto images, text or other Web site objects, which are then embedded in the site code.

The application comes with more than 20,000 sounds in the library and will ship in November 2001.

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