Talking With Pictures

A Business Idea To Create A Website Where People Can Communicate Using Pictures Instead of Words

Talking With Pictures

Why don’t we use pictures to communicate when everybody understands them much better than

words?

It’s because we don’t have rules to form pictures into sentences. What we need is a visual grammar.

This presentation provides a very basic introduction to how we can create a visual grammar.

I Developed The Concept Of Frames To Create The Rules Of A Visual Grammar

Every picture will have a frame around it. Rules will be encoded in icons inside the frame. I am provisionally referring to them as frameicons.

Different parts of speech will have different frameicons.

An Example of a Noun and the Rules Applied to It

A profile of a head represents a person or people. The circles frameicon represents one, few or many people. The first circle is selected to represent one person

An Example of a Verband the Rules Applied to It

The above picture represents running. The triangular frameicon represents future and past tense. The future one is selected meaning will run. If neither is selected it means am

running. If both are highlighted it means shall have run

Extending the Visual Grammar

The next step is to extend the rules to give structure and meaning to multiple pictures so people can create visual sentences.

Additional frameicons must be also be created. For example to identify sex or to indicate intensity like good, better, best.

Cater for DifferentLevels of Sophistication

Simple users will use basic pictures and simple or no frameicons. Sophisticated users will use all pictures including those representing abstract concepts and the full range

of frameicons. Other users will be somewhere in between these two extremes

Build a Minimal Viable Productto Test This Idea

Once I have a minimum number of pictures and enough frameicons for basic conversation I’m going to build a prototype website using Google App Engine. This

will enable me to test the concept and get feedback so I can grow the product.

Use Crowdsourcing to Turn the Prototype into a High Quality Product

Try and get as many people as possible to test the prototype and ask them to add pictures to the dictionary and give feedback on

everything they can that will help to improve the product.

Enable People All Over theWorld to Talk with Pictures

My goal is to provice a high quality website which will provide an alternative visual means of communication for people who cannot

use normal means to communicate