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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...
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.
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"
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.
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.
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...