Cicret wristband turns your arm into a touch screen

Ref : foxgadget.com

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The Cicret Bracelet will project a tablet interface onto the user’s arm

With wearables gaining some traction, smartphones and tablets are by no means the only mobile devices around nowadays. Now, though, Cicret is looking to take things a step farther and turn your arm into a smartphone.

Conceived 12 months ago and designed over the course of 6 months, the Cicret Bracelet is a small wristband that looks similar to the Jawbone Up.

The Cicret Bracelet’s proximity sensors work out where the user’s finger is and allows them to interact with the display like any other touchscreen

The Bracelet comprises a pico projector and a row of eight proximity sensors that point towards the user’s forearm. It operates as a standalone device and, when activated with a twist of the wrist, projects an Android interface onto the users arm, much like Chris Harrison’s Skinput research. The proximity sensors detect where the user’s finger or fingers are and allow them to interact with the interface as they would any other Android device.

There are potential advantages to turning ordinary objects (or, in this case, limbs) into mobile devices, but projected touch screens typically lack the responsiveness and visual clarity of the glass screens we’re used to. This projected keyboard, for example, delivered a poor typing experience.

It should be interesting to see if the Cicret Bracelet can improve on the technology, to make something we’d actually want to use.

The Cicret Bracelet will be available on 10 different colors

Elsewhere, the Cicret Bracelet features an accelerometer and a vibration module, along with an LED for notifications. Connectivity is provided by way of WiFi, Bluetooth and a Micro USB port. It is expected to be made available in 16 GB and 32 GB models.

The device will allow users to send and receive emails, browse the web and play games. It will also be possible for users to pair it with an existing smartphone, answer incoming phone calls and activate the speakerphone functionality on the their smartphone.

Cicret is in the process of raising funds for the further development and production of the Bracelet, but Pommier says he expects the device to reach the mass market within a year and a half. The device could cost up to $400, he says, based on what the company’s research suggests people would be willing to pay (sounds like a hard sell to us).

Cicret co-founder Guillaume Pommier tells Gizmag that the first prototype is due for completion in about three weeks time.

The video below provides an introduction to the Cicret Bracelet.

Source: gizmag

Upcoming Version Of Google Translate Will Include WordLens Image Translation And Auto-Detection For Conversation Mode

Ref : foxgadget.com

A few months ago Google purchased the developer of the impressive WordLens app, which translates text and signs from another language into your own simply by pointing your camera at it. The text appears in your language through the lens, as if you had super-powered Translate-O-Vision. As with Waze and Google Maps, it looks like Google’s own Translate app will soon see the benefit of that acquisition. Check out the screenshots below, taken from an upcoming version of Google Translate.

Upcoming Version Of Google Translate Will Include WordLens Image Translation And Auto-Detection For Conversation Mode

You can see WordLens’ trademark feature at work in Google Translate above, where it’s live-translating an English menu into Spanish without any kind of delay or recording. Here’s the original image:

Upcoming Version Of Google Translate

You can try out this functionality in the original WordLens app, which was made free after the Google acquisition. The initial rollout of Live Translate in Google Translate will work both ways between English and French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Unfortunately, the version of the app we’ve seen can only go to and from English – there’s no way to translate from, say, Russian to Spanish with this live mode.

Google Translate

But there’s good news if you’re traveling, or often speak with people whose language you don’t understand and vice versa. The awesome conversation mode, which is basically as close as you can get to a Star Trek-style universal translator, is going to be faster and easier in a future update. The current version of Translate requires the user to manually select each language in sequence, or let one person speak after the other in a very artificial fashion, kind of like a multi-lingual version of hot potato.

Note the center screenshot: “Speak now Hablar ahora,” instructs both English and Spanish users to speak at once.

The updated app will actively listen for both languages currently activated, automatically translating (in this example) the Spanish-speaker’s words into English and the English-speaker’s words into Spanish. This will let both parties speak more naturally, with no waiting for each one to complete a long sentence or description if the other sees a correction that needs to be made. As long as you select the right to and from languages, both users should be able to speak and read or listen to the translation more or less continually.

We don’t know when the updated app with these features will be available. (Don’t ask us for an APK – if we could give it to you, we would.) But the implementation seems complete, or nearly so, so we can hope to see it in the next major Google Translate update.

 Source : androidpolice.com