"The Star Trek PADD needs more power Scotty!" "It just doesn't have it, Captain!"

Going from Enterprise-A in the original Star Trek to Enterprise-D in The Next Generation was like trading in your bulky vacuum-tube television for a flatscreen. The flips and buttons that operated Kirk’s ship were replaced with the sleek touchscreen consoles of Picard’s. I used to watch enviously as Commander Data’s fingers would bounce rapidly across the surface to, you know, find out if the planet was M-class and inhabited. Now, because of a new app from CBS Interactive, we don’t have to wait until the 24th century to have 24th century technology. The official Star Trek PADD app for iPad looks, feels, and sounds–sort of–like a piece of that technology slipped back through a tear in the time-space continuum.

Using the PADD is like accessing the Enterprise’s LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System). It’s an impressive encyclopedia of everything Star Trek, from Aldebaran mud leeches to Zanthi fever. It includes official information published by CBS on StarTrek.com about the television shows, movies, even the animated series. But unlike the true LCARS that promptly gave the crew everything they wanted to know upon voice command, this imitation seriously lacks in efficiency and completeness. Browsing tools are annoyingly inconvenient. You can peruse broad categories such as “characters” or “food,” but other than that you to either have to know exactly what you’re looking for or scroll through the voluminous minutiae of the Star Trek universe. And all too often you find the details of the entry severely lacking, leaving your thirst for Star Trek immersion largely unsatisfied. And a surprising number of entries don’t have images. Like the combadge that the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew used to communicate with each other. Seriously, they couldn’t find an image of a combadge?

Nice presentation, poor content...Seven-of-Nine's image notwithstanding.

The LCARS interface display is annoying too. While fun to look at it is disappointingly nonfunctional. Click on most of the busy graphics and you get nothing but random messages vocalized with the ship’s computer voice. Rather than an on deck LCARS computer it’s a mishmash of Star Trek graphics and sounds thrown incoherently together.

The PADD only comes in handy when you don’t have access to Memory Alpha, the much more comprehensive online Star Trek wiki site. I have to say I encountered my biggest disappointment browsing the Technology and Ships sections. The 24th century-like touchscreen technology of the iPad meant graphic entries could have been interactive. I imagined zooming into the bridge, or checking out the layout of ten forward, or clicking on the warp engine nacelles–instead again I got a few paragraphs and, if I’m lucky, a few images too. In CBS’s promotional video below you pretty much see everything you’re going to get.

The app’s cost, $4.99, doesn’t sound like a lot until you actually spend the money and see what you’ve got. It seems obvious to me that CBS Interactive just wanted to get an app out with the least amount of effort. I had high hopes and was pretty disappointed. Makes me want to throw the developers in the brig…if only I can find it.

[image credits: iPad Insight and Geeky Gadgets]
[video credit: TrekMovie via YouTube]
image1: PADD
image2: Seven-of-Nine
video: PADD

The Google Translate mobile app is a hint at the awesomeness that is to come.

The Universal Translator is one step closer to reality. One awesome and frustrating step. The Google Translate mobile app, now available on iOS as well as Android platforms is the sort of technology we’ve all been waiting for since we first saw Star Trek. Simply by speaking into your phone you can have your words translated and then spoken aloud in a different language to someone else. The person you are talking to can do the same in reverse. And what do you have to pay for this proto-universal translator? That’s the best part, it’s completely free. Amazing. Google Translate currently works in 57 languages of which 15 are available for speech to text and 23 languages available for text to speech. Go and download the app right now. Seriously, go do it now. Just be prepared: as wonderfully freeing as this technology could be, it is very far from perfect. This app hints at, but does not completely deliver on, the universal translator we will want in the future.

The following videos demonstrate the use of Google Translate for Android and iPhone respectively. You can see the original presentation of the ‘conversation mode’ feature by Google in our previous discussion.

For the past 24 hours I’ve been doing little more than playing with Google Translate on my iPhone. I may have kept my wife up at night. I may have apologized in translated Hungarian, Japanese, and Haitian Creole. I may have received glaring looks of death. It’s hard to remember.

What I can tell you from all this testing is that the translations on the app are amazing. Simply wonderful. You can give the program fairly high level words (‘adumbrate’, ‘evanescent’, etc, etc) or ambiguous phrases (“This thing is not the thing I ordered from the other thing”) and get the right translations. As Google has proven time and time again in its online tools, the search engine’s statistical approach to the task is both powerful and flexible.

Yet it’s the voice to voice capability that really drives our desire for a universal translator and it is here that things begin to break down for the mobile app. The program takes your speech, converts it to text, translates, and then converts the translated text to speech. The latter three parts work well. The first is a frustrating quagmire of pronunciation fueled guilt. No matter how much I articulate, no matter how carefully I space my words, it’s rare for the app to capture what I say perfectly. Working with Google Translate can feel like talking to your aged aunt who is deaf in one ear. Having to repeat the same simple phrase four times to be understood can be damnably frustrating.

Google makes up for this with several useful features. You can edit the text of your speech in case the program didn’t understand what you wanted to say. Phrases can be starred so that they are saved and easily accessible to be used later. The text translation can be displayed in a full screen mode to make it easier for others to read. As it is, I could rely on the Google Translate app while traveling, but I would still need some of my own language skills in order to get by. The app is great, but it’s not a universal translator.

Perhaps more patience is needed. As we’ve seen with Watson and other forays into real language comprehension, understanding human intent is still a difficult task for machines. Speech to text will get better as we move ahead, and as it does Google will undoubtedly improve upon its mobile app. At the same time they will likely expand their list of available languages and features. (Hopefully we’ll get ‘conversation mode’ on iOS soon.) The Google Translate app has irked me these past hours with its failings, but overall I am still absolutely delighted by its presence. A good, not perfect, proto-universal translator is available for free on your mobile devices. 2011 is shaping up to be an extraordinary time in history. Who knows how quickly this technology will take off in the years ahead. Google Translate gives me hope that one day the language barrier will no longer divide humanity. Beyond that, who knows what might happen…

[image credit: Google]
[video credits: AppVee, ABCMSAJ, Google Channel UK]
[sources: Google Blog]

Feel like the captain of your own room with these DIY automatic doors.

I have found the perfect project for all of my fellow Star Trek fans out there. Why walk into a room through a regular door like a chump when you can strut into your pad like Kirk on the prowl through air powered sliding doors. Enter via these bad boys and watch green skinned aliens swoon as the doors close behind you without you lifting a finger. An enterprising (get it?) young engineer has designed this real world Star Trek entrance so that it is simple enough to work as a do-it-yourself project (though one that involves house renovation). You can find all the information to build your own set on the Instructables website. Even if you don’t have the urge to tear down your walls and install copies of these doors all through your home you can still enjoy watching them in action. Check out the brief demo of the doors, followed by an extended tour of their capabilities, in the videos below. That ‘woosh’ sound makes my heart flutter.

Here’s a quick look at the doors. Kirk and Picard would be proud:

In this extended tour you can see the internal locking mechanism for the doors, as well as a look into how they are powered. Make sure to check out the doors’ appearance from the outside starting around 2:20. The inclusion of a digital keypad is pretty wonderful.

The creator of these doors is ‘Marc’, a 26 year old Star Trek aficionado and engineer. He’s also the co-designer of a plush toy that interacts with the iPhone (Xachi Pet). While he only recently uploaded video of his sliding doors, according to his blog Marc actually made them back in 2006. In true Star Trek fan style he was living in his mom’s house when he installed this icon of his love for the science fiction franchise. Parts for the project cost around $500, with untold amounts of labor. Pictures of the installation make it look like Marc really tore his mom’s house apart putting in the air compressor and pocket doors. Make sure to warn your own mother before you follow in his footsteps.

If you really want a pair of these doors for your home (and be honest, you do want them) you may be able to purchase a set someday in the future. According to his blog, Marc has been dreaming up a “consumer” version of the doors for years now. His work in the medical engineering field has made him realize how many innovations and improvements the project really needs. Chief among them would be an emergency back up system in case of power outages. Apparently he and his mom have been locked out of the room twice in the past four years and had to force the doors open. I can only hope that he roared like a Klingnon while he pried them apart with his bare hands.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go speak with my landlord about a few minor renovations I’ll be making around my apartment.

[image and video credits: UI Productions (Marc)]
[sources: UI Productions Blog]

Will the iPhone be the Universal Translator of the future?

When watching Star Trek, I was always amazed that the aliens all spoke English. Writers explained this happy coincidence by the presence of a universal translator (UT), a portable device which could take any language and translate it into any other language as needed. Our nonfictional modern world has more than 20,000 different languages (if you include dialects) in its history. With the rise of globalization we desperately need an universal translator to help us speak to one another. Luckily, there are several different companies that are taking the first steps to creating an UT. Sahkr and Jibbigo have developed iPhone Apps which transform the smart phone into a handheld speech to speech translator. Check out some of their demo videos after the break.

Computer aided speech to speech translation isn’t easy. You need speech recognition, language analysis, machine translation, language generation, and speech synthesis. We’ve had limited handheld translators for some time. Devices like Voxtec‘s Phraselator allow you to select a range of sentences and have them translated into many different languages. We’ve also had more complex non-portable systems (like IBM’s MASTOR) which can do nearly full translation. But the products created by Sahkr and Jibbigo represent a new paradigm in speech to speech: commonly used hardware devices adapted solely through software. By integrating into an existing hardware platform, these next generation programs are taking us one step closer to having a universal translator that anyone can carry in their hands.

Sahkr is one of the premier English/Arabic translation companies in the field. The translation software, Arabic Language Buddy, went live in September and is now available for download on either the iPhone or BlackBerry. It is limited to conversions between English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), but it works amazingly well:

Sahkr takes great pride in the realistic synthetic voices used for their translation software. I don’t speak MSA but the flow and tone of the translation is much better than I would have expected. The company press release also claims that their translations are ranked #1 by the US government. Users can even adjust the text of their translation (via keypad) to better communicate their words precisely before it is spoken. As you can imagine, this high quality comes at a high price. The software is for lease only (which isn’t that unusual for premium smart phone Apps) and the first month is $10. Subsequent months, however, can cost you either $50 or $150, depending on whether or not you qualify as an academic user. That’s no small change for the average user, but for the international business traveler it likely falls within budget.

If you’re looking for a cheaper option, and you favor the iPhone over the BlackBerry, look no further than Jibbigo. Developed by Alex Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University, and released in October, Jibbigo does most everything that Shakr does, just in Spanish and only on the iPhone. You can edit via keypad, shake the iPhone to restart, and there’s even a back translation check. All that, and you make just one payment of $25.

The difference in price between the two applications may reflect a relative scarcity of Arabic to English translators, but I’m guessing it also has to do with Shakr’s higher status as a translation service. Jibbigo is a fairly new company with hopes of expanding from Spanish and English into other major languages. Recently however, they had to deal with an audio glitch in their first released version (it’s fixed with an update).

The tele-scouter projects texts and images directly into your peripheral vision and could easily be used as a speech to text translator.

Of course, a portable UT doesn’t have to fit in your hand. NEC’s Tele Scouter is a head mounted optical display which projects words and images into your peripheral vision. Engineers claim that the use of the peripheral allows you to wear Tele Scouter for hours without headaches or other discomfort. It is very light weight, and essentially looks like a small projector on a pair of glasses. A digital eyepiece reader is connected to a portable computer which interfaces with a remote server giving the user access to a local (or perhaps even global) network. Currently, NEC plans to market Tele Scouter as a means for engineering and technician teams to remotely share data and expertise in vivid detail. For a team of 30, the Tele Scouter system would cost around $8 million. NEC will launch in 2010 and hopes to sell 1000 such systems in three years.

A trimmed down version of Tele Scouter may be adapted to serve as a universal translator. With rapid access to a remote server, the eyepiece has much more resources at its disposal than a smart phone and could serve to provide closed captioning during a conversation, as well as an augmented reality experience. There has been some buzz that NEC plans on following that route.

Yet even if Tele Scouter stays a high-level engineering network tool, the concept behind a visual universal translator could be adapted into another system quite easily. Today, all it takes is a web browser and Google to translate text from one language to another. In fact, judging from our servers, many of you actively use Google to read this blog in a non-English language. It’s only a matter of time before someone combines a head mounted display, a mobile internet connection, and speech to text software to create a do-it-yourself UT.

If you’re looking to start one of those DIY projects, you should do so quickly. As Shakr and Jibbigo find success in their Apps, we’re likely to see similar products spring up for many more languages. Eventually smart phones will become powerful enough to support translators that can identify and convert anything they hear. Many of the technologies we review on Singularity Hub are expected to take many years or even decades before they come to full fruition. Speech to speech hand held devices, however, are already here. Universal translators may appear much sooner than anyone believed possible. So get excited, Star Trek fans, the 23rd century is arriving early.

[photo credits: Shakr, NEC]
[video credits: Shakr, Jibbigo]

Want to join Star Fleet and take a tour of the Enterprise? Couldn’t be simpler: go to Experience the Enterprise, fire up your webcam and print out the special page the program prompts you for. Iphone users can forgo the printing and use a special webpage display instead. Activate the Active X software at the prompt and you’re good to go. As always, Total Immersion’s AR tech blends streaming video and pre-recorded images in real-time to produce an eye-popping effect. Check out the demo video:

Paramount and J.J. Abrams have been working over-time to convince the movie-going public that you don’t have to be a hard-core Star Trek fan to enjoy the movie. (I am a hard-core fan, and I did enjoy the movie, btw) The “Experience the Enterprise” website is a nice step in that direction. Even if you’ve never heard of Star Trek before, the free AR demo would be too cool to pass up. It’s one of the first, if not the first, free AR programs that you can access online and try out for yourself. Did I mention that it was easy to get to work and totally free? Stop petting your tribble, put your 3D chess game on hold, invite the Orion ambassador over and check it out!