Eye tracking.

There is a percentage of the world that are limited in how they can communicate where it be paralysis or other disability, Their eyes are their best chance of communication.

There is eye tracing software available where it could record where the person looks and output it.

Text to speech technology can also be included in this so that the user can spell out words with their eye sight and then speak it out to the people around them.

this will break the barrier between communication and current ways such as sign language.

A basic idea of this would be :
A screen
Camera
Speaker


the screen could be set up to include the most commonly used words such as yes or no and the alphabet to enable full dictionairy use.

This is definetly something i want to look into and possible develop for this project.

combining communication

Communication has developed in itself ever since the day of man, where technology has been pushing the development, in this current generation, the digital generation, communication is becoming more and more frequent virtually. Where social networking and email is helping long distance communication easy and quick.

This is also a downfall as real life communication is slowly decreased by this now "online" generation.

The development of social networking could be seen in the future as possible "avatars," these are already currently available on game consoles such as the "Wii-me" and the xbox equivlent avatar.

The customisation of these can be created to look like the corresponding user.

Possible The online universe which is currently held within a screen, can be brought back into reality and these avatars could infact be self developing and self learning, but based from the original source, for example:

Google, this is currently the number 1 accessed site worldwide, if the internet were made into a virtual reality, a user could talk to the "google avatar" and using speech recognition it could react to them.

this would ultimatly take the internet away from a screen, food for thought.

Communication in babies and toddlers.

Babies begin to express likes and dislikes with body language, nodding in agreement or wrinkling their nose with displeasure. They'll also begin to communicate what they want by pointing, crawling, and gesturing.

You'll know that your baby understands what you say when you ask: "Where's Daddy?" and your little one looks his way, or you say: "Go find the blue ball," and he or she crawls right to it. Your baby should respond well to his or her own name, and should look up (and at least pause) when you firmly say, "NO!"

(http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/communication/c812m.html)

Babies develop their communication skills from early ages by mimicing their surroundings or by using facial expressions, whether learnt or natural, they are founded by reactions and/or outcomes.

Sign language can be used to help them communicate from very early ages and this will help them learn association quicker.

Many of the toys amde for babies are things to help them learn, such as toys tht make noises from certain buttons, a lion = roar etc.

Morse code

Morse code is a type of character encoding that transmits telegraphic information using rhythm. Morse code uses a standardized sequence of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a given message. The short and long elements can be formed by sounds, marks, or pulses, in on off keying and are commonly known as "dots" and "dashes" or "dits" and "dahs". The speed of Morse code is measured in words per minute (WPM) or characters per minute.

Smoke signals

Smoke signals are one of the oldest forms of communication.

Using puffs of smoke people could communicate from tower to tower up to 300 miles in just a few hours.

Although there were downsides to this such as weather conditions and lighting.

In a sense a developed format of smoke signals can be seen in a distress flare, this flare is used mainly at sea to alert someone. The flare itself shoots up and lights up the sky to show someones position.

following on from this a new idea could be using High intensity discharge lights, having some form of activator to start them and have them pulse or flash, The light from these Xenon bulbs is immensely bright and could be seen from a high distance.

Brief

You are required to research and examine outmoded means of communication and re-purpose the most appropriate for the new media digital age. Your challenge firstly to understand how the chosen method affected change in its context of its time and secondly, to propose and construct a contemporary response.

Keep this blog of my work and draw inspiration from my research.

Looking as, for example, smoke signals, drums, semaphore and heliographs

test post

this is a test.... no really it is