CMU develops a prototype in-mouth "babelfish"
It kind of freaks us out that the interACT program (International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies), a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Karlsruhe, unveiled a system consisting of 11 electrodes that detect mouth muscle movements, translates that to a spoken language, and then re-translates that into other languages. But what really freaks us out about the interACT "babelfish" prototypes they're developing, more than the in-mouth/throat electrode translation system they've theorized, were the "translation goggles" that lipread other languages and subtitle your field of vision with translated text, or focused-sound translation "beams" that can make a room of internationals like a wireless, computerized session of the UN. The system and its underlying concepts are still far from perfect, but for as much as we whine about not living in the future ideal as much as we wished we were, this is a pretty decent start.
