Producer and Director in a box
You are listening to a Robinson Crusoe audio book while in front of your computer. As the audio progresses, illustrations from the book appear on your screen. Noises, photographs, short videos and other images appear. As you listen to the book you see desert island seashores, hear the clanking of a sword and scabbard, and the distant the cries of prisoners killed and eaten by cannibals as waves crash against the skeleton of a long sunken ship.
The "audio book direction and production" application that choreographs the noises and images would use an artificial intelligence similar to speech to text, or image to text software to analyze the words and sentences, in advance of the reading, to make sense of the ideas conveyed. The application would tie to an existing Internet search engine, or use its own dedicated image and sound recognition search engine to gather, display and play the sounds and images as the words are read.
In a controlled net community, readers become producers and directors and create and insert their own, or add existing Internet images, sounds and music to the "film." This software creates a growing and ever-changing source of audio and visual entertainment to those that read already, and a further enticement to non-readers to discover the pleasure of literature.
In a sense the software would produce a slide show to accompany the book's contents, word for word. Advanced versions of the software could compose animated films to accompany the audio book, or create the special effects by a Photo-shop-like combination of existing images.
Copyright issues would have to be handled by the lawyers.-- Sunstone, Sep 13 2010 While searching for the category placement of this idea I found a similar concept Projected_20Text_20Audio_20BookThis idea link projects audio book illustrations; I have posted other details [Sunstone, Sep 13 2010] Can I have a "lolcats only" version?-- DrWorm, Sep 13 2010 random, halfbakery