Crazy Deaf Joe Blog

MobileASL

Since many years, there is no such mobile phone allows us to have a live communication via video but until this came up across my email and this sounds so interesting, I am glad they are developing and testing it out. It seems promising but I am sure they have long way to go before it can be release to the public.

MobileASL is a video compression project at the University of Washington with the goal of making wireless cell phone communication through sign language a reality in the U.S. With the advent of cell phone PDAs with larger screens and photo/video capture, people who communicate with American Sign Language (ASL) could utilize these new technologies. However, due to the low bandwidth of the U.S. wireless telephone network, even today’s best video encoders likely cannot produce the quality video needed for intelligible ASL. Instead, a new real time video compression scheme is needed to transmit within the existing wireless network while maintaining video quality that allows users to understand semantics of ASL with ease. For this technology to exist in the immediate future, the MobileASL project is designing new ASL encoders that are compatible with the new H.264/AVC compression standard using x264 (nearly doubling compression ratios of MPEG-2). The result will be a video compression metric that takes into account empirically validated visual and perceptual processes that occur during conversations in ASL.

What the MobileASL Phone look like:

To see the MobileASL Video below, go ahead:

I do expect that in the years to come, we will have device like this will be available for deaf community which will be awesome so we can place calls like if your car broke down, or women who get raped or whatever, we can call friends, family, 911 etc live and in real time. We need this badly, that’s for sure.