Brighton-based Getfrank has built an online chat room, the communicator, with sounds and animation to enhance text message conversations.

The room is to help promote Sony's w.ear headphones, aimed at the teenage market.

Getfrank senior producer Iain Davidson said: "It is an online emotion-based tool designed to appeal to the fashion-conscious, mobile phone-using 15 to 19-year-old age group.

"Users can chat online for free at the w.ear web site and infuse their messages with animation, sounds, images and colours to give extra feelings to the communication."

If someone is telling sad news, animated rain can fall in the background while melancholy music plays and the colours change to dark.

A love letter could be full of pink hearts and cheerful song.

The system is based on a collection of symbols used to represent emotions in text messaging.

Smiley, frowning or winking faces made from text characters are typed in to let the recipient know the sentiment behind brief messages.

The software recognises these and other symbols and automatically adds animation and sound to match the mood.

Mr Davidson said: "People use abbreviations, known as emoticons, when texting because they do not have a voice or body language to rely on as when talking face-to-face.

"We looked at a way of taking these and injecting them into the functioning of the chat room to make the environment more fun.

"We chose six emotions commonly used in one-to-one text conversations happiness, laughter, sadness, anger, cheekiness and love.

Messages containing these feelings have more energy in the chat room because of the extra features.

"We put buttons on the interface so people not used to text chatting using emoticons can set the mood using a control on the side."

The challenge for the Getfrank team was to capitalise on the text messaging boom while keeping the communicator relevant to the product it was intended to be marketing.

Mr Davidson said: "As a marketing tool, the communicator had to reflect the attitude of the Sony headphones.

"We picked up on how users can change the colour of the headphone clips to match their mood and this visual way of displaying a message became the key to our development of the chat room."

The communicator, which has been in development for three months, is available free at the Sony web site.