Mary Panttaja

An interesting post this morning from Tim O’Reilly about an NSF grant for research on translating American sign language (ASL) to speech. This will accellerate (cute!) the development of the use of accelerometer sensors as part of the input device into the computer. ( Accelerometers capture the speed and direction of movement.) I asume the ASL speaker would wear devices on his hands/fingers.) This is what the Nintendo Wii has done with its new hand-held controller that captures directional movement. Last week we learned to play tennis on the Wii at my son’s house. Jim and I got a kick out of using full arm swings, though Jon just uses his wrist.

I get a kick out of a reference in Tim’s article that is becoming mainstream (at least mainstream in the geek communities): The Minority Report UI, from the movie Minority Report. This refers to the elegant computer interface used in the movie, with a clear class wall as in the screen and dramatic arm gestures to control the high-bandwidth visual data being displayed. So this sci-fi movie reference is becoming a defining factor in how we talk about the future of our technology. Of course, this is a ongoing relationship between future-looking fiction (they do their research) and our culture (we get to see the future before we build it.)

Speaking of alternate UI technologies, we spent some of the weekend playing with the speech controls on our Macs, to only middling success. (It works better if you wear a microphone.) I am hoping to start using a recording/transcription device while I ride my bike—just to capture ideas and sentences that occur to me. (More on that in another post.) So finding multiple ways to move work into the computer is just in the air these days.