In 2002, the public-affairs office of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders effused about Patterson, sneaking in the caveat only at the end: The glove doesn’t translate anything beyond individual letters, certainly not the full range of signs used in American Sign Language, and works only with the American Manual Alphabet. Patterson received considerable attention for his “translating glove,” including the grand prize in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and a $100,000 scholarship. A high-school student from Colorado, Ryan Patterson, fitted a leather golf glove with 10 sensors that monitored finger position, then relayed finger spellings to a computer which rendered them as text on a screen. The first sign-language glove to gain any notoriety came out in 2001. It was called the “talking glove,” and the entire system cost $3,500-not including the price of the CyberGlove itself. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier was announced in 1988 by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived.
0 kommentar(er)
