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Trekkie Communicators Now a Reality
SolFire writes "Forbes is carrying an article about Vocera Communications and their little internal communication system that they have working at their office that functions like the badge communicators from ST:TNG. The employees wear the system as a badge and touch it to start the connection. Then they speak the name of the person they want to talk to and the system connects them using VOIP for one-on-one communication." We mentioned these in 2002.
What do they do if there are two people with the same name?
That is one heck of a badge from the picture they show. I was thinking of the little triangle pin-on from Star Trek.
just intigrate this technology of picking up words that havent been spoken yet
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Oh great, I can just see this at the hospital
*beep* Doctor Smith, this is the Lab, Mrs. Thompson's results came back positive for chlamydia.
I'd be more impressed with a belt-pack which communicated with a small earbud via bluetooth or similar.
Article also mentions paging for an anesthesiologist and getting the closest one. I wonder if they do that based on the AP, or if they have plans to add a GPS receiver. Considering the amount of interference in a hospital, I can't see GPS working.
I use my hands free kit now. I touch the button on the ear piece, speak the name of the person I wish to call and voila, I'm one of the teaming masses walking around looking like I'm talking to myself. So ok, this is located on the shirt ala ST and uses the PTT model, ho hum.
What I want is a blue tooth hands free kit that's small and comfortable enough to keep in your ear (and doesn't make you look like a 'tard, figuratively and literally) that has a very easy way to dock it seamlessly into your phone.
"How come Homer and Krusty look like clones?"
It was to show the irony that Bart did not respect Homer, while at the same time idolizing Krusty (essentially the same person).
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Look at the iPod, the only real reason why it is taking off is becase it is fashionable. If I had a cell phone, that had a bluetooth headset, and a pin that did the conecting I would be happy. I don't like carrying my phone around, but a simple decorative item(changable covers anyone????) with a bluetooth headset for a private converstion would be really cool.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I can see this company doing a couple of things different with this device. One, use a different protocol for transmission of the signal. I work in a office where our sales reps are always out when you need them to be here to answer questions. If this device had a hard set IP address, that is routeable, at least if the sales rep was near a hot spot, you could get ahold of them. Also, it would be nice to see some better design with this device. It's isn't huge or anything, but it needs to be stylish, something that this model does lack. Also the ability to encrypt any communication just in case you don't want evesdroppers and script kiddies sniffing your network or hearing what's going on.
Personally, I would like to see a earbud or something, just in case you wife calls you and wants to talk about what she want to do to you when you come home.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
You don't even need a boom mic. I've got a Jabra ear piece that doesn't need a boom. The nice trick would be a keyword that would facilitate activation of the comm link. Voice activation for all functions. The biggest problem with making it an entirely in-the-ear unit would be radiation from the antenna being that close to your melon.
In a few years to integrate GPS and be able to say "Computer, locate CmdrTaco". Or how about Google's former voice search?
Google's CTO Craig Silverstein has already said his grand vision for google in the future would be something along the lines of When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice.
With a few more technologies like this, it's only inevitable this WILL happen.
i've decided, after reading several other unrelated stories here on slashdot, that this sort of thing doesn't go far enough.
want something really badass? combine these communicators with the "campus ghosts" concept. throw in a gps. tie it all back in to a huge server farm in the bowels of some university.
now you can smack your communicator and address the computer (with it's awexome speech recognition capabilities and limited AI) directly, and ask it for directions; or maybe just what's on the menu at the cafe, or if there are any books left in a particular subject at the bookstore.
you could smack it up and set it to "record mode" so that it picked up your professor's lecture, and then later you could grep through it verbally, or have the text or audio file uploaded to your desktop. set reminders on the thing, ask it for definitions of words or have it call off a formula to you, or send the text to your pda.
hell, you could even ask it for a weather report or world news.
of course, this is largely based on "Prime Intellect" from the online novel of the same name - uh . . . only, without all the reality warping and stuff.
i'm just sayin . . . hurry up with the future. i need a little electronic elf to keep up with my crap and make sure i don't kill myself in some dumbass fashion.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
There is actually a little warp field around the main computer that allows computations to perform at faster than the speed of light. Due to relativistic effects, this means that the computations must be traveling backwards in time, so the computer already knew what Data was going to say. Furthermore, it knew what he was going to say several seconds ago. By the time Data had finished asking the computer to connect him with Worf, not only had Worf's communicator already paged him, but it had done so several seconds ago. This is how Star Trek charecters get the time to sigh or stretch for several seconds before responding, and yet always sound to the other person as if they'd responded right away!
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Now what would be really sweet is to combine this with NASA's sub vocalization technology.
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http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/18/01
Welcome to the 21st century baby.
Bluetooth certainly has the bandwidth for two-way voice--that's why you can buy a Bluetooth wireless hands-free headset for your (Bluetooth) cell phone. For example, one from Jabra. However, the range of Bluetooth is much shorter than Wi-Fi. At a maxium of 30 feet (a lot less going through the walls in my apartment), Bluetooth would be less convenient than Wi-Fi. Also, Wi-Fi access points are already becoming prevalent, whereas Bluetooth access points are less widespread. Though you can buy a Bluetooth access point, Bluetooth is meant more as a device-to-device standard for peripherals, not a networking protocol. It would be easier to cover a large buiding with Wi-Fi, and the network would be multi-use, allowing laptops and PDAs and such to connect along with the badges. While it's possible for devices to use Bluetooth to use a computer's internet connectivity (see the Share2Blue2th AppleScript that my friend C.K. wrote for allowing a cellphone to browse the web over a computer's intenet connection (that's the reverse of the usual way where a notebook uses Bluetooth to browse the web over the cellphone's modem connection)), it's much more of a hassle than with Wi-Fi, which was designed expressly for that purpose.
there is an other way...
"The "telephone tooth" would place a small device in a person's back molar that includes a wireless, low-frequency receiver and a gadget that turns audio signals into mechanical vibrations, which would pass from the tooth directly to the inner ear as clear sounds. "
If you were wasting time on /. as early as I was this morning you'd know they just have one of these on every starship too.
I wonder if it was extra or just standard equipment by then.
No sig for you!!
Just saw another story on Slashdot earlier that'd be relevant: NASA Develops Tech To Hear Words Not Yet Spoken. Just combine the two, and you get a telepathic device!
I wonder whether anyone has modded a a cellphone with voice-recognition into a 1967-style ST communicator. Seems to me that it would be easy to do, especially the part where you flop open the mesh cover to the tune of that neat cicada sound...