3pointD.com

Glitchy sends along an interesting project from the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University known as News at Seven, which scans news and blog headlines and automatically creates a three-minute newscast which is then delivered via text-to-speech translation by everyone’s favorite female first-person shooter, the Alyx character from the Half-Life games. I’d love to see this in a virtual world, automatically generating a newscast from 3pointD stories and the like. The demo newscast seems to have been tarted up by the app’s creators (”The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.”), but there’s no reason why a straight show shouldn’t work. An entertaining addition to the growing number of aggregators out there.