A startup that spun out of Taiwan's
University of Science is working on gloves that can translate sign language
gestures into text. Such a concept isn't new by any means, but the elegance of
Yingmi Tech's hardware deserves some special attention.
The company was actually founded by a
team looking to build a more elegant way to control objects inside virtual
reality. But it transpired that the same hardware was sophisticated enough to
identify the motion of the hands as well as bends in the fingers.
Compared to other
sign language gloves that we've seen, Yingmi's are some of
the sleekest and most elegant. The box that houses the gyroscope and batteries
is pretty small, and yet each hand has enough power to run for up to eight
hours at a time.
There are, however, problems, such as the
complexity and size of the Chinese language compared to others. I'm told that
most smartphones aren't capacious enough to hold all of the gesture data to
encompass natural signed speech.
In the demonstration, a user can instead
speak in broken sentences, like the phrase "You want Coffee? Milk?"
rather than anything more florid. As a consequence, Yingmi is looking into
building a cloud-based translation platform to lessen the burden on the local
device.
There is, right now, no word on when such
gloves will become commercially available, but the hope is that a pair will
retail for less than $200.
No comments:
Post a Comment