My Concept

Concept

My concept is base done research I have done about my subculture, Deaf Culture. One of the main elements in this subculture is the use of sign language for communication. In contrary to spoken language, sign language is 3D en therefore can contain a lot of information in a few signs. When using sign language somebody can physically show a time line and orientation in space.

With this in mind I started of thinking of a way to make modern communication trough hand gestures possible for everyone. Because sign language usually is too complex to be used be somebody that hasn’t learnt this language. Deaf people that use sign language have a much better developed dimensional perception then people that don’t use this way of communication. It’s impossible to use the total array of sign language, but it is possible to use simple intuitive gestures to, for instance, create an interface to control your mobile phone.

I came up with the following concept. I’m thinking of a way to make simple communication faster en more intuitive. By using a device that follows en registers hand motion a want to control a mobile phone and give it an extra dimension. This device could be a sort of camera hanging around the neck which uses software to recognize hand gestures. This device is connected to the mobile phone that can stay in your pocket (or possibly is a part of the device hanging around your neck). I’m thinking of several ways to use this technology.

It can be used to open your phonebook, for instance by making a gesture that reassemble an open folding book, and by moving you finger up and down you can scroll trough your phonebook. Feedback about the name will be given verbally by your phone. After this you could use your hand (making a phone gesture) to call this person or to send him or her a sms. It would be too complex to simply use gestures to form a complete unique sms (sign language isn’t hard to learn for nothing) but there can be a lot of presets you commonly use like ‘where are you?’, ‘how are you doing’, ‘what are you doing?’, ‘I love you!’ etc. The recipient receives the sms and the phone starts vibrating. After opening the sms it can be verbally read by the phone. Using software and GPS the phone recognizes for instance the question ‘where are you?’. In reply of this sms some could simply point down and the phone sends back a sms with the exact location of the person. In this way sms communication becomes much faster and natural.

But this technique could be taken further. With using GPS, and recognition of other devices in the near vicinity its possible to locate each other. You could make a list of your friends and store that in your device. When you are in a busy bar you could point to you friend a send this person information about your location (Hey, here I am, behind you). Because you don’t want to send this message to everybody around your friend the device filters trough you ‘friend list’ and ‘locks in’ on them.

Using this technology communication can happen even faster and more intuitive.