Welcome to Conspire’s Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Google’s OpenGlass Project Gives the Visually-Impaired a Read on Things
This is just so, so cool, you guys — while the whole Google Glass situation hasn’t been as well-received as originally anticipated, where developers are taking the technology is nothing short of incredible. OpenGlass, the brainchild of PhD students Brandyn White and Andrew Miller, couples Glass technology with augmented reality and crowdsourcing for an enhanced user experience. In this particular project, OpenGlass tests the aggregate functionality with visually-impaired users. A featured called Question-Answer allows the user to ask what a certain object is, receive a response redirected from Twitter users, and then hear the answer from the device. A second additional feature called Memento allows non-visually-impaired users to program Glass to recognize different objects, which another user can then hear described when they view that same object, effectively allowing visually-impaired users to ‘see’ and navigate the world more easily. Watch the video to see it in action.
The Rise of the Smart Web
The internet is a lot of things. Ridiculous, beautiful, insane, ‘a melee’. Really, you could pick any adjective and be perfectly correct. And therein lies the problem — with such a vast chasm of things, incessantly updating and forever burying information that predates it by seconds, curation becomes more of a laborious hunting game than anything else. And while the independently-famous can use the Internet’s platform to become exponentially more notorious, the underdog hopefuls with truly worthwhile blogs, art, and ideas are often left climbing an infinite ladder towards an unreachable plateau of recognition.
Enter Scoop.it, a San Francisco-based content curation startup with an admirable and simple mission — to cut through the noise of the internet and help people share ideas that matter. “Human beings aren’t predictable,” says Founder and CEO Guillaume Decugis. And since most curation is done courtesy of computer algorithms, it misses out on the one thing necessary to make content truly valuable: us.
The Babelfish is Real! Sort of…
If you’ve ever read or watched Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then you’ve met the Babelfish, a fictional creature that, when inserted into the ear, is capable of instantaneously translating any language into the user’s native tongue. The folks over at Google thought that was a nifty idea, and have, in a nutshell, decided to use their world-dominating advancements in technology to make the Babelfish a reality — at least as a machine. The early iterations of the project, circa 2001-2004, were riddled with issues, showcased in grating detail by an email sent from an enthusiastic tech fan from Korea, which when translated through the system, read ”The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!”
Good for a laugh, but not quite in sync with Google co-founder Larry Page’s plan to ‘organize all of the information in the world’. These days, the company is marching forward with gusto, having already correlated 506 language pairs — meaning, there are that many languages that Google’s Babelfish can translate into any other language.
“Search is going to get more and more magical,” says search engineer Johanna Wright. “We’re going to get so much better at it that we’ll do things that people can’t even imagine.”
Oh! And, it’s National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, so you know. Go do that.
The post Fun Friday Links: Google Glass for the Visually-Impaired, the Babelfish is Real, and a More Meaningful Internet appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.