Patent ID: 8063905

Claim:
A method of animating speech of an avatar representing a participant in a mobile communication, the avatar displayed on a display screen of a mobile communications device, the method comprising: selecting, by a computer, one or more images to represent the participant; selecting, by the computer, a generic animation template for the participant, the generic animation template having a mouth, the mouth characterized by a mouth position; fitting, by the computer, the one or more images representing the participant with the generic animation template; texture wrapping, by the computer, the one more images representing the participant over the generic animation template; displaying, by the computer, the one or more images texture wrapped over the generic animation template; receiving, by the computer, an audio speech signal derived from the mobile communication of the participant; identifying, by the computer, from the audio speech signal, a series of phonemes, each phoneme in the series of phonemes representing a portion of the audio speech signal; and for each phoneme in the series of phonemes: identifying a new mouth position for the mouth of the generic animation template, wherein the identifying the new mouth position for the mouth of the generic animation template comprises retrieving coordinates of the mouth position from a phoneme map data structure in dependence upon an identification of the phoneme; altering the mouth position of the mouth of the generic animation template to the new mouth position, wherein the altering the mouth position of the mouth of the generic animation template to the new mouth position comprises redefining a plurality of vertices and a plurality of weights of a portion of the generic animation template corresponding to the plurality of vertices and the plurality of weights identified from the phoneme map data structure; texture wrapping a portion of the one or more images corresponding to the altered mouth position of the mouth of the generic animation template; displaying the texture wrapped portion of the one or more images corresponding to the altered mouth position of the mouth of the generic animation template; and playing, synchronously with the displayed texture wrapped portion of the one or more images, the portion of the audio speech signal represented by the phoneme.