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Sign Language Out Loud
hcetSJ writes "CNN.com has an article about a glove that reads sign language and can translate to spoken English. Although it's only one-handed now, and can only handle about 200 words, the inventor has further plans for a second hand and wider vocabulary. I wonder if this could be linked with the Rosetta Stone idea, to quickly expand the vocabulary. Also mentioned in the article is the possibility of military use...gaming control can't be far off." grvsmth points to a more detailed article on GWU's website.
I wonder what it says when you're masturbating?
/me flips you the bird.
/me's glove attempts to translate it as "Eagle".
/me's glove BSOD's.
Dammit...
Micheal Criton the gorilla had a glove that did the same thing.
ASL (and other sign languages) aren't just word-for-word translations of Englis (and other spoken languages); they are true languages with their own unique grammar. Any attempt at an on-the-fly translation would, it seems to me, result in a muddle that would make the Babelfish sound like Shakespeare.
jf
"I want to produce something that deaf people can use in everyday life," he said.
Don't get me wrong, mod me down if you want, I'm sure he's tried his best, but isn't this the wrong invention. My experience working with people with impaired hearing is that their speech is fine. It's hearing that they have a problem with.
A glove that translated other peoples speech into sign language would be much more useful.
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
This will make my hand talk to me?
Hell, you might as well get married.
Best Windows Freeware
Ah, the memories... I did a similar project in college, building a sensor glove which translated tonic sol-fa (music sign language) into MIDI using a Basic Stamp embedded processor. Worked rather well, actually.
The other half of my project was to do the same thing using video recognition, which is also mentioned in the linked article. I used the built-in camera of an SGI, and a nice fuzzy logic matching algorithm.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
Greetings Professor Falken
Uh Uh Uh Uh Uh Uh Uh !!!!!
High-tech solution to a low-tech problem. /pen and paper (you'll need it anyway unless they read lips)
And outside gaming, the idea comes and just as quickly goes. Here's an article about tele-medicine using VR gloves, where someone at location A pushes on your abdomen and a doctor at location B "feels" whether your spleen is out of joint. The date on the article... July, 2000. Going nowhere.
And here's a telling statement from the referenced article:Something is making it darned difficult to bring VR Glove technology to fruition, despite almost two decades of poking around with it.
What's the "killer app" that will have us all putting on our V-Gloves?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
ASL is as much about facial expressions and body language as it is signing...to leave them out is to confuse the meaning of the sign, often completely. Everything is very emotionally charged.
I would suggest that more people learn sign, because if nothing else it will help them to become more expressive individuals.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
...or was it Next Step? Either way, I saw this idea on the Discovery chanel probably 8 years ago. At that point they said the computer hardware wasn't fast enough yet.
This is the first time I can remember one of the inventions on those shows actually coming to light. Cool. Those hours in front of the TV weren't wasted afterall.
--Ben
I remember seeing this glove on TV when I was a kid. Back then, all it could do was spell in sign language, so this is a definite step up. As far as *gaming* goes, don't tell me that y'all have forgotten the Nintendo Powerglove!
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Perhaps someone might make a new computer interface with it. Something like seen in the movie minority report, staring Tom Cruise.
Perhaps it already exist, i don't know.
But I would sure try it. I find it annoying that I always have to switch towards a mouse for certain tasks.
Hopefully it reduces RSI.
But as with everything, it depends on the design.
It can replace keyboard and mouse.
It can be used in places where you can't talk vs speech control.
It can replace a touch-screen in certain circumstances.
It could be used with a pen or a blackboard, provided it can learn your movements when writing and transfer your written words into a digital form.
Who knows, with nanotech we discards the globe and build it into our hands.
Ho, well. Your imagination/memory is as good as mine.
Did anyone else immediately think of the scene from Mr. Hollands Opus where the deaf/mute kid signs "Asshole" to his (asshole-of-a-) Dad?
--
I studied ASL for 2 years... there's a helluva lot more to the language than hands... and much of the language would be impossible to translate with a computer.
Facial expression is nearly as important as the hands. "should" and "need" are the same sign, with a slight difference in the shape of the mouth. Its like trying to understand somebody who enunciates poorly, speaks in monotone, and doesn't pause between words or sentences...
A lot of the language relies on physical description... there's no way a computer could interpret a lot of it.
At best, this will be able to translate "SEE", or Signed Exact English. Not ASL. There's a HUGE difference. ASL is as different from English as sculpture is different from music.
Then again, maybe I just better drop the whole topic and crawl back under my rock.
My parents used to tape a program on public television called Discover: The World of Science, presumably related to the magazine. Peter Graves hosted it, and my folks would stick one of the tapes in the VCR to keep me amused when I was being difficult.
The format was a series of 15-20 minute pieces on various neat pieces of science, and I distinctly remeber a segement about a "talking glove." It was a mechanical hand on a small stand with a keyboard and Hawking-esque voice synthesizer, and a glove wired with electrodes. When someone typed into the keyboard, the hand would fingerspell whatever was being typed. When a person wearing the glove fingerspelled something, the voice would read it out, a la Mac SimpleText (anyone else get in trouble with that in school when it first came out?) The system had to be trained to recognize someone's fingerspelling. They showed a deaf and blind woman going out shopping with the system, not needing an interpreter.
Based on the hairstyles I remember from the program and my age at the time, this would have been in the mid to late 80's. I have no way of proving I'm not making this up, of course.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
American Sign Language also includes hundreds of gestures that express single words and simple sentences, but most require two hands.
He said the device usually is accurate, though the precision declines with complicated movements; for example, words that start with the same hand movement or orientation.
Though not an expert on signlanguage by any means, I do remember learning about ASL as a grammatically complete language, i.e. that it was not merely a series of words but used some forms of particles and has a full grammar (strict syntax and temporal expressions) Also, as far as I recall, this slight variation in the complexity of the signing accounts for such important distinctions as time and space as well as who the actor was or whom it concerned. These kinds of kinks would need to be ironed out significantly if emergency information is to be conveyed accurately. However, the AcceleGlove is not a new technology that would simply be useful for deaf people in emergency situations. The ability to communicate through hand gestures could also be used to teach ASL, along with being modified for use in virtual reality, military settings, and in different forms of sign language.
These ideas are interesting (and better conveyed in the GWU arcile!)
Maybe I'm just reluctant to believe someone has created a translator for a language when he has merely translated a small set of words. You don't learn to speak (or sign) a language by learning words. As in any language its either inflection or word order that lends meaning (among other things)- how should the meaning of a signed phrase be any more clear just by knowing what the individual words mean...
Remember the book "Train Go Sorry" (about the
deaf community, eg with some -declining- sur-
gery that would give them the power to hear)?
Why? Something about nurturing their deaf
community, ie as something special & unique,
just as valid & worth preserving as, say a
particular & special species of whale, et al.
Seems a bit like members of the Open Source
Movement declining to load any flavor of
Windows (or other proprietary software) onto
their computers.
(Also a bit like Fahrenheit 451's community
of people who declined to give up great works
of poetry, literature (ie books), that were
prepared to live apart - if they had - just
to keep their traditions (& forbidden books)
alive, so that they could be passed to the
next generation.)
Back to Sign Language:
Too bad that folks who speak only / primarily
(typically -one- flavor of) Sign Language
-still- have barriers to communication with
many of their contemporaries, who happen to
know -another- one [ie, their local] elsewhere
in the world.
And, this applies to English-based sign lan-
uages (AusLan in Australia is incompatible
with its US counterpart, et al.).
The effect is unfortunately akin to "divide &
conquer" where international organisation of
deaf communities is seriously limited, -or-
more likely to be in the hands of non-deaf
people, who may or may not represent the
interests of the deaf communities' majorities.
Have we got a cool techie solution that looks
after the interests of deaf peoples' needs &
desires to build bridges between geographi-
cally &/or Sign Language divided communities?
Or are our "innovations" (such as the one
that speaks "Out Loud" - not very helpful to
a deaf person) just designed for us, or maybe
to support -surveillence- by of deaf people
and/or their communitiesHomeland Security?
Let's try to build tools that bridge gaps
not just toys that might be misused here.
My 2 cents...
+5 insightful, now i'm sorry i used my mod points up already.
/. crowd's being face to face people skills), but we don't see news spots about the 28 year old geek living in his mom's basement overcoming obstacles and going out and getting a non-tech job and having his own apartment and enjoying his city's night life, do we? nor do you see anyone engineering any sort of chip or device to help people with problems like that. all that being said, i think it's cool that someone is thinking about helping another community 'fit in' better with the 'rest of us' but (as technologically cool as it is, and i hope it gets developed for other uses like computer games/operations) a poll of said community might indicate better what they want from 'us' to feel more a 'part of the crowd'.
the easiest way to see if this is something useful for the non-hearing/speaking community is to ask them. i agree with your point that most people in certain situations don't see it as a disability or hinderance in day-to-day life, it's just part of life and who they are. along the same line of thinking, i have mixed feelings about documentaries or special clips on the news saluting people 'living with such a hard problem' or whatever. they get along alright, they don't have a problem with their difference, and when it comes down to it, every person in the world has his or her own difficulty in life (mine and probably a good chunk of the
-PsychoI3oy
mmm freeBSDelicious.
"Just keep your PowerGlove...off her."
A huge percentage of ASL is non-manual (I forget the percentage, but I think it's over 30%). Facial expression can completely change the meaning of a sentence. If you make exactly the same signs but shake your head, you've negated the meaning. Or if you say something but raise your eyebrows you turn it into a yes/no question. Distance is communicated with head tilt, size with the mouth, and some signs change depending on if you stick out your tongue. So it's not just a question of idiom, but a significant amount of meaning. Much more than bablefish signal loss.
To give you an idea of how hard it is for even a fluent, bilingual, human speaker to translate ASL and English, let alone a machine, there isn't even a useful written form of ASL. Attempts at written forms of ASL all end up looking like pictograms of gestures, not symbolic representations. The information density is very high in comparison to written language, because the visual channel is parallel. Experiments show ASL can communicate spatial information in 1/3 the time of spoken language, and it's very fast for other kinds of information as well. Classifiers (iconographic descriptors) and spatial reference pronouns rock.
By the way, I don't know how the inventor signed "I'll help you" with one hand (RTFA). That's a two-handed sign. (Note that it's a single sign. The sign for the verb "help" is inflected, so it always includes a subject and object as part of the gesture, indicating them by positional reference.)
... talk to the hand
Two Rules For Success:
1) Never tell people everything you know.
On development I find intriguing: claims that babies can learn to sign before they can learn to talk. Which is cool if it help loving parents bond with and begin educating their kinds more quickly. Not so cool if it becomes yet another for overcompetitive parents to put their kids on the achievement treadmill too early.
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