Know someone who talks with their hands so expressively that you have to step back or risk catching a wayward exclamation point in the face? The video after the break will make their day. Students at
Duke University have come up with a way to use phone accelerometers to capture gestures with surprising precision, allowing them to pipe those motions through a character recognition algorithm and, hey presto, turn flapping hands into letters and numbers. The prototype app is called PhonePoint Pen, and while right now the process looks painfully slow, with large, precise motions required, with a few months or years of refinements you might just be able to jot down a quick text to a friend while running between terminals, all without putting down the double latte that just cost you $8 at the airport food court. The future, dear readers, it's closer than you think.
[Via
Yahoo! News]
posted Jun 11th 2009 6:57AM
mama mia
That's how they say it in Romania, where the white guy is from. I've no clue about India, though.
If I wanna use my smartphone for remembering where I left my car .. I take a phone of it and geotag it!
but this is pretty cool ..
err . photo .. ok so its late ..
Just an FYI, you can already do this with some phone apps and way easier than having to take a photo: http://en.androidwiki.com/wiki/ParkMark
That guy doesn't have thick enough glasses
Wow they look so out of shape...
This looks useful.
/sarcasm
Woo! NextWorld!
the expression is QUE PRESTO. Were you trying to write your article on an iPhone?
Would have been better if it said Engadget!
Better results in this area had appeared years ago. Handwriting input can be done by using the built-in camera of a regular camera phone. A large vocabulary, multi-lingual (supporting English, Chinese and Japanese) handwriting recognizer for camera phone was created more than three years ago at UC Berkeley. Web site: http://tinymotion.org/ video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3pVaEVHpvI
The letter "P" looks so different between what he made the movement and the encoded image on his phone?
will be huge in Italy
It looks to me like they just have some software that draws from the accelerometer and some software that does optical character recognition (there are a million out there).
Nothing very impressive, and it probably doesn't work unless you write some huge correct letters in smooth movement, making it impractical. It's a lot easier to just type directly on your phone, as it won't make your whole arm hurt after a few words written :)
Smells like someone was REALLY desperate for a thesis idea. I can think of zero uses for this stupid tech. Poor kids... you can tell they want to be engineers soooo bad.
Oh thats not really needed, when people are busy designing and fine tuning voice commands for different accents... just seems as a waste of time n money!!!
cheerleader app ?
I'm just happy to see an article about someone developing something on an N95 8gb instead of an iPhone for once. In fact I'm happy Engadget even covered it considering that fact.
I would totally use this! In fact, I'd love to test it out for the guys/gals. :)
haha...dude, these engineers (or whatever they are) better stick to developing technologies...the uses they suggested suck!
The article and the title are a little misleading.
"Hand-talkers" and and gesturing are not what is being shown in the video clip.
IN the clip they are literally writing the letters of the alphbet in the air as they would on a chalk board except without chalk and using an iPhone. Nothing more!
Hand Gesturing while people are talking is basically an extension of an emotional response to the conversation. Poeple who talk and gesture with their hands while doing so do not "write" out the letters of every word theya re speaking.
The title should reflect something more like:
"PhonePoint Pen application is a note-takers' dream come true"
While the article itself should more accurately explain the content in the video which it fails horribly at. The clips shows something more akin to Texting or Twitter notation than it does actual hand-gesturing.
This concept is totally useless and waste of time..
However, what I really want to know is why every time we see some new technology/engineering/science research project at a top university in the United States, it is always a bunch of foreign geeks! Could you imagine if all the right-wing anti-immigration/student visa people got their way? We literally would have to shut-down most of the graduate degree programs in the physical sciences, life sciences, engineering, computer science, etc. Oh man how far we have fallen as a country in education.
Who would pay $8 for a latte? $1 for a cappuccino at Speedway ftw (Speedy Rewards!).