WordsEye: An Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion System

Natural language is an easy and effective medium for describing visual ideas and mental images. Thus, we foresee the emergence of language-based 3D scene generation systems to let ordinary users quickly create 3D scenes without having to learn special software, acquire artistic skills, or even touch a desktop window-oriented interface. WordsEye is such a system for automatically converting text into representative 3D scenes. WordsEye relies on a large database of 3D models and poses to depict entities and actions. Every 3D model can have associated shape displacements, spatial tags, and functional properties to be used in the depiction process. We describe the linguistic analysis and depiction techniques used by WordsEye along with some general strategies by which more abstract concepts are made depictable

Spatial Relations in Text-to-Scene Conversion

Spatial relations play an important role in our understanding of language. In particular, they are a crucial component in descriptions of scenes in the world. WordsEye (www.wordseye.com) is a system for automatically converting natural language text into 3D scenes representing the meaning of that text. Natural language offers an interface to scene generation that is intuitive and immediately approachable by anyone, without any special skill or training. WordsEye has been used by several thousand users on the web to create approximately 15,000 fully rendered scenes. We describe how the system incorporates geometric and semantic knowledge about objects and their parts and the spatial relations that hold among these in order to depict spatial relations in 3D scenes

Enhanced Epithelial Gene Transfer by Modulation of Tight Junctions with Sodium Caprate

The airway epithelium is resistant to infection by gene transfer vectors when infected from the luminal surface. One strategy for enhancing airway epithelial gene transfer is to modify paracellular permeability, thereby permitting the diffusion of vectors to the basolateral surface, where uptake receptors are expressed. We investigated the ability of a medium-chain fatty acid known to enhance drug absorption, sodium caprate (C10), to increase airway paracellular permeability in comparison with ethyleneglycol-bis-( β -aminoethyl ether)-N,N′ -tetraacetic acid (EGTA). Apical application of C10 decreased transepithelial resistance by > 90% within minutes, whereas EGTA required an hour or more to produce a similar effect. C10 increased mannitol and dextran permeability by sevenfold, as compared with a twofold increase produced by EGTA. A greater enhancement of adenoviral lacZ gene transfer was mediated by C10 (50-fold over controls) than by EGTA (10-fold over controls). This correlated with a significant enhan..