Back in the good ‘ ole days before the internet and Yo and Meerkat and Snapchat , we had one way to talk to people in far-off lands : the phone . But a microphone and speaker are n’t much consumption if you ’re hearing impaired .
In 1979 , a Bell Labs enquiry task devised a elbow room of pass on with sign speech , using just the bandwidth of one telephone set line . 35 twelvemonth ago , video chat was n’t feasible for most users , so the challenge was to extract sign language down to something that could be encoded and sent over the ( very circumscribed ) bandwidth supply by a unmarried speech sound cable .
The solution was to place 27 retro - pensive dots on the hands and case of each individual , and then point a vivid light and a camera at the signer . The dots — and only the dots — were detected by the transmitting gimmick , which could then send the positional info to a screen at the other final stage . The researchers , Kenneth Knowlton and Vivien Tartter , outlined their achievement in this paper in Nature .
As well as being an impressive technical feat — commemorate , they pulled this off before the Walkman was a matter — it ’s also a good lesson in designing engineering science around the user . It would have been easier to just force the hard - of - hearing to only use written communication , or learn some other , more machine - friendly mark words . But instead , Knowlton and Tartter found a solution with zero learning curve and full user - friendliness . Better than I can say forcertain thingstoday . [ AT&T ]
reach out to the author at[email protected ] .
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