Lip reading mobiles are wunderbar, still at the prototype stage (video)

We came across this lip reading prototype during our exploration of the CeBIT 2010 halls, and while we're a bit tardy in bringing it to your attention, there's a certain timeless quality to strapping your face with wired sensors that transcends conventional restrictions of timeliness. That's our story anyway. Devised by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, it picks up the motion of speech (via electromyography) without requiring the sound, and then translates it into audible communication via a delightfully cold and robotic voice. The purposes of such a project are obvious -- from helping people who've lost their speech to making private telephone conversations actually private -- but the fun is in seeing someone use the thing in its current unrefined form. You'll be able to do that just past the break.

[iandean Posted Mar 15th 2010 9:40AM]

doesn't strike me as very mobile...

[blitzkrieg Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:47AM]

Am I the only one who thinks this thing can fry your face?

[Montgomery Posted Mar 15th 2010 9:46AM]

The ultimate phone accessory!

[mikmik111 Posted Mar 15th 2010 9:48AM]

I'm sure I want to wear that.

[snoxie Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:12AM]

It's obvious -- weave this technology in to a hog ridding biker's face bandanna, and then could talk hands free to whom ever.

[CrymeLord Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:19AM]

The guys in that pic look like Gilligan and Jim from The Office.

[NathanHeil Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:25AM]

HAHA. i can't not look at that without laughing.

[NathanHeil Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:25AM]

@NathanHeil i think i worded that wrong =[

[KAL326 Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:53AM]

Wouldn't texting be easier? Although long down the road if they could use a forward facing camera, maybe with infrared, that could read your lips ala MS Natal then I could see that being worthwhile and mobile. As for this, well you have to start somewhere.

[Shunnabunich Posted Mar 15th 2010 9:37PM]

@KAL326
I dunno, most of us can talk faster than we can type words on a tiny little number pad (or touchscreen), and this is (from the user's perspective) just talking without using one's vocal cords. If this could be distilled down to an easily wearable, flexible lower-face-mask type thing, I don't think I'd mind using it.

[savagemike Posted Mar 15th 2010 10:59AM]

Time to start growing my privacy mustache...

[rms16270 Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:02AM]

I've always wanted a fu manchu

[skyblaze Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:02AM]

what's in your wonderbar?

[skyblaze Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:14AM]

@skyblaze

ahk, fail. meant wonderball

[chirod1976 Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:14AM]

it is a start I guess... what help is that the guy is cute

[Plazmic Flame Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:42AM]

Well, at first I was thinking this is stupid but I guess it's good to always have new technology in the pipelines. I just wish that current technology would be perfect first. Voice recognition still isn't perfected.....

[mmafighter077 Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:56AM]

The guy on the left looks like Gilligan from Gilligan's Island.

[mmafighter077 Posted Mar 15th 2010 11:57AM]

@mmafighter077
http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2005/09/07/gilligan_wideweb__430x313.jpg

[shishi Posted Mar 15th 2010 12:15PM]

I thought it was some device to help them breath our atmosphere a la Battlefield Earth.

[whit3 Posted Mar 16th 2010 7:32PM]

And you thought that people with bluetooth headsets looked like douchebags...

[pankomputerek Posted Mar 15th 2010 4:34PM]

I sent it it like a month ago and they still didn't even add my name on the bottom! Sooo angry!