by Jay Garrett on June 12, 2009
Here’s another clever robot that looks like a real 1950’s droid 
Ninomiya-kun doesn’t read e-books – that’s too easy!!
This reading robot handles those old-skool paper and ink numbers.
Nino stands at 1m tall and weighs 25kg and was showcased yesterday for the first time at a robot show in Southern Japan. The robot was jointly developed by two Japanese and one Chinese university.
Ninomiya-kun is able to read through a character recognition software installed on a PC that he carries in his backpack.
His two camera eyes look at a book page and then reads it out loud via his voice synthesiser.
The bookbot is able to distinguish about 2,300 Japanese characters, which is the minimum amount the national school system expects Japanese people to learn at school.
I saw this clever bot on Yomiuri Online via Crunch Gear
by Jay G on March 31, 2009
Researches in Finland have been working with a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet that will create an intense pulse of vibration that may work as braille.
The clever Finnish folk have developed a method for piezoelectric touchscreen devices that uses a single pulse to convey a raised dot, and a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses to represent a missing dot.
In this way they are able to spell out letters that can be easily read by touch.
It did take a while for the volunteers to get the hang of it but once they had it down they were able to read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds.
Now that letters seem to be sorted the team is moving on to words and sentences.
All of this is with the aim to developing text-to-braille software sometime in the future.
This was reported in the New Scientist.
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