SKIRMISHER

Anybody who has read Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows what the Babel fish can do:

“…if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Now Tanja Schultz and colleague Alex Waibel of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania have built “a device that uses electrodes attached to the face and neck to detect and interpret the unique patterns of electrical signals sent to facial muscles and the tongue as the person mouths words. The effect is like the real-life equivalent of watching a television show that has been dubbed into a foreign language.”

Sounds like the babel fish, only so realistically complex.

via NEW SCIENTIST

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