Video calling has never taken off despite a long history of attempts starting in 1955, and culminating in today’s front-facing cameras on 3G handsets. But finally someone has worked out a useful application: signing for the hearing impaired.
The technology behind it compresses data with attention to skin tones (hands/face) as that’s what is conveying the important information. That’s needed because 3G hasn’t properly hit the US yet, so the compression needs to work over GPRS-speed connections; also, sign-language is too fast for existing compression methods.
More over at SciAm.
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