Their logo (left) seems rather elaborate to indicate a simplified sign system?
It is an application to help the teaching and learning of Weerklankgebaren. This is a set of about 1000 signs (with images, pictograms and the like) which are quite similar to this Simplified Sign System from the US. You could buy a book (50-60 euro), but this software (135 euro) lets you create on-demand practice material, practice on the computer, and play a memory-game.
Dear Jeroen,
I assume that gestures have a content and a form. Do you think it is possible to translate only the structure (form) of a gesture, ignoring the meaning (content) of it? Is there a way to translate body language into body language, avoiding it´s message and being consequent with its space-time elements? Would be nice to know your answer.
I love your site!
Greetings, Monica Antezana
Ever dreamed of being the world's premier digital collage building designer? (source)
Inspired by his work a group at the TU Eindhoven recently made news headlines with Blue Eyes (pdf - video), their version of a Cabinet-like scanning and collecting device. They also use gestures to manipulate the images. You can even use both hands in certain gestures. The hands are tracked by the overhead camera, there is no touch-sensitive display involved it appears. I would think that a multi-touch solution would fit the design nicely as well.
They use it to make mood boards. Do you know the difference between a collage and a mood board? (source)
Deadline for submissions of abstracts is NOVEMBER 25, 2006
The International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS) was founded in 2002. They organize conferences (Austin 2002, Lyon 2005, Illinois2007) and supports the international journal Gesture. The Nijmegen Gesture Center is one of the supporting pillars, as are the labs of Janet Bavelas, Susan Goldin-Meadow, David McNeill, and the Berlin Gesture Center (see their links).
Anna, a cheap but decent embodied conversational agent?
She may not solve your problems, but she will sell you a lovely couch whenever she can. Well, I find particular fault with the annoying way she keeps smiling, charmingly lets her head drop to one side, and blinks her eyes at me.
I asked her "Did you know the Ikea concern is a financial myriad of foundations sleucing away the money to the Dutch Antilles without paying decent taxes anywhere?" Anna merely blinked her cold blue eyes without moving a muscle and replied: Read here to learn more about IKEA in the world.
Well I guess Ikea are as good as most companies and not as bad as some. Or at least I tell myself this every time I need cheap, but decent furniture.
The place to be on oktober 27th?
Featuring, among many other speakers, yours truly :-)
Register at the website for a humble 10 euro's. You will not be disappointed. There are nice talks, nice sandwiches and a good crowd. Many Deaf Germans attend. It is something of a social event too. I have been to the last two workshops and found them very nice. They really organise things to accomodate Deaf attendees. Two sign language interpreters and large video projections aid the presentations. The group in Aachen working on sign language recognition is one the oldest in the field.
Dear Jeroen,
I am enjoying your blog. You have just the right balance of visual interest, short articles, humor and a great deal of knowledge lurking about behind the scenes. This is what my blog should do, but it gets mired in earnestness and I don't blog regularly.
With a colleague I am writing a book on what we call the principles. To be a principle something should be manifest at all levels and its withdrawal would make the universe as we know it collapse. This is a very modest project as you can see. An example of a principle is attraction: molecular bonds, gravity, sex, magnetism, planetary orbits, obsessions, addictions, flies and shit, money and misers. The list of attractions is infinite. Principles have the interesting quality of being evident only in their manifestations. You can't see, hear, smell, touch or taste an attraction but they are everywhere and you constantly experience them.
My colleague, whose concept this is, believes that gesture is a principle. I am wrestling with the question. One problem is that gesture seems to be interpretive and communicative, so it seems to be for the human and animal realm. But, when I look at plants, flowers and trees each seems to have unique and characteristic sets of gestures. A prickly pear cactus, for example, has very different gestures than a Rembrandt tulip. My writing desk has scalloped ornaments, and curvaceous entarsia. These, it seems to me, have gesture, as does the grain of the walnut. At some point pattern seems to achieve lift off and take on what I can only call gesture. If you look at this portrait by Rubens, you can see gesture in the clothing, the feather on the hat and the background.
Does this use of gesture make sense to you? Is gesture only in the eye of the beholder and the intent of the gesturer? Can a marble cornice have gesture? Does gesture seem so fundamental that you could call it a principle?
Cheers,
Geoffrey Thomas
Will you write me? (source)
Some of the emails lead to a small discussion. Ideas are exchanged or good questions posed. I will then ask the writers if I can put the mail online for two reasons. First, to share it with the other readers. Second, to archive it on the website. I simply post the original email and put the rest of the correspondence in the comments.
You like to write but do not want it published on the blog? Don't worry, I will publish nothing without your explicit permission.
I am the eye in the sky (source)
Well... some people, like Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, want a gesture interface to Google Earth. Check out their DIY gesture recognition with Atlas Gloves. They use a dual-layer projection, like in the Playstation Eye-Toy and Xbox. The software is open source and downloadable. So anyone can try to get it working, and people do.
I wonder: will Google Earth be that Killer Gesture Application?
Perhaps the combination of being able to gesture and using a big projection on the wall is what makes it so good? Google Earth looks nice on a big screen. And gesture recognition needs a bit of distance between user and camera. So it works nicely in this case. Some of the functionality may however be difficult, like entering city names or coordinates.
Here are some guys who use a fancy two-handed touchscreen to create a speech and gesture interface. They use the speech recognition for entering city names and specific commands like layer activation. How would the Atlas gloves do that for you?
Will Garfield benefit from his gestural abilities in an evolutionary sense as well?
Will Jon be able to use his mirror neurons to understand Garfield's intentions better next time? (source)
And then again it may not be a matter of out-evolving other animal species. We may have to go up against the machines one day. At Honda (maker of Asimo) and ATR they are equipping robots with abilities to read minds and imitate gestures.
Victory for the machines? (source)
At least for the machine it is clear how it accomplishes the task. It scans your brain with MRI. That brings us back to humans and their mirror neurons. How does it work? We do not scan other people's brains. We merely have our eyes.
I believe that we see what we want to see as much as what is actually shown. We do not read minds but project our own minds unto others. So do our mirror neurons inform the visual system and the rest of the brain (and body?) what to see? Or does my visual system communicate directly with unknown human motion perception bits and pieces. Pieces that are as much about perception as they are about motor production?
It would be very interesting to see what happens to firing mirron neurons in cases of misjudged intentions. Suppose we think we see someone about to hit another man, whereas he was actually just scratching his armpit (for want of a nicer example). Would the right mirror neurons fire, because it is but the low-level motor programs associated with the actual postures and movements that are mirrored? Or would the wrong mirror neurons fire because they are under the control of our higher 'mind projecting' powers?
I thought I saw a terrorist
Acting suspiciously
So my neurons fired first
Triggered unhappily
Men will be boys? (source)
And now it appears that Pakistan captain Inzamam-ul Haq made an insulting gesture to umpire Darrell Hair, resulting in Hair's leaving of the match against England, effectively ending it. Unfortunately, there is no picture of the actual gesture. It's like with cricketer Darren Lehmann, the web is silent. There is only this strange description:
"Inzamam then made a waving gesture to which Hair took great exception and walked out. One explanation is that the Australian umpire felt the gesture was insulting to anyone who knew anything about Pakistani culture." (source DNA Indiae)
Was it like this one from Shoaib Akhtar? (source)
So, has anyone seen it and are you willing to share an event so uncharacteristic of the grounds with this audience? Was the insult obvious to all bystanders or was Hair overly sensitive? Or did Inzamam think he could be clever and insult the umpire in a way that it would be clear for them both but not for anyone else. Did he think Hair would not be able to act on it if nobody else saw it? I think this sort of complex reasoning might be how the perception of insults sometimes works.
(source Vi-taal)
The stories were part of television show De Gebarenwinkel broadcast by the VPRO from 1989 - 1990. One of the signers, Tony Bloem, is a very active storyteller here in the Netherlands, some of his works are available at Vi-taal. He also translated children's books into NGT and sells them for a reasonable price on DVD.
If you are evil you should be warded off now (source)
The Tarjani Mudra is reported here to be made only with the index finger. And here is a source mentioning that the Tarjani-mudra is the same as the Abhaya-mudra.
(Thanks for the link Patto).
Do you feel Clinton has anything to apologize for? (video)
I am glad I live in a country where failing to kill anyone is not a political risk factor. But on with the gestures: It is not the first time Clinton is in the same position and using the same gestures to an American journalist.
Just think your happy thoughts
Oh and of course a bit of pixie dust
From the one and only
Tinkerbell
My kids just got the old Disney version of Peter Pan and are loving it. And so do I. What a lovely story about fantasy and growing up. But the tiny Tinkerbell caught my professional eye as well. She is interesting to watch for her gestures and body language. She doesn't talk, she just tingles and gestures. Check the movie for examples. Still Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the others who believe in fairies understand her.
I started to pay attention to how she gestures and it struck me that she barely mimes, nor does she create language-like gestures. Nearly all of her gesturing is spent on expression of her emotions or attitudes towards Peter and Wendy.
Now I find myself at a crossroads. Behind me is the road I traveled through a land of gestures that were all about form and meaning, about semiotics and perception. I felt the expressive aspect of gesturing to be mostly besides the point. And the point was that practically all gestures signify something. They all carry meaning from maker to taker. And my main interest has been how humans achieve this so effortlessly.
Oh no, not feelings! (source)
I had expression of emotions nicely stacked in a box of (mostly) facial expressions, subtitled 'unvoluntary universal displays'. One does not so much intend to communicate with them, but onlookers can glean information from them.
But I am afraid it is just not true. Humans (and fairies) use displays of emotion as a way to communicate them to others. We can fully intend to influence others to our advantage this way. An expressive gesture can in fact be a complex social act, even if it has its roots in a simple reflex.
And so my choice is made
I will not grow up
But endulge myself in fantasy
And let my feelings come alive
Let us gesture
Let us fly
Why doI tell you these things here?
Because sometimes, a PhD-student needs to know he is not invisible and not alone... (sniff ;-)
A meeting between Americans and scary foreigners? (source)
Is it part of a xenophobic program of fear? Are people really convinced they won't be able to establish fruitful communications with foreigners? Or do we just like to point out the differences between cultures? For my own piece of mind I will assume this last suggestion is true in most cases.
Do I think that cultural differences are not interesting? No, they can be interesting, but I think there are more interesting things to tell about gestures and culture than just point out different meanings for emblematic gestures. Desmond Morris, in his Gestures, their Origin and Distribution (1979), at least provides great information about the spread of meanings of a gesture throughout Europe and a history. See this example of The Thumb Up. If you want to talk about culture and emblematic gestures, follow his example and do it right.
Some trust in God, and their God alone. Few may trust in humans, but I thank God I am one of those happy few. I believe people are able to handle cultural differences if they are both willing. Gestures will seldom lead to misunderstandings. In fact, I will raise the reward for evidence of a gesture mix-up to 150 euro.
I think gesturing will often help you communicate to strangers, and clarify your intentions. It can form the basis of acquiring an unknown language. I felt confident when I went to Italy and Russia that I could jumpstart communications through gesturing. I quickly picked up a bit of Italian and Russian like that and to top it all off: I learned the meaning of their gestures without any problems.
A meeting between New Zealanders and kids from Yemen (source)
When my kids grow older I hope to teach them not to be afraid to walk up to friendly strangers and talk to them. We are all humans after all. And I will tell them to talk with their hands if words fail. Gestures are not our enemy, they may well be Man's best friend.
Is a perfect sign in the eye of the beholder? (source Heather Brooks)
What a gesture should look like is the code shared between producer and observer. It is the language, or the semiotic system, employed by them. We articulate a gesture in such a way that it will hopefully carry the right message. We try to produce something that looks like the target. When we do this we take into account both how we think the observer sees it, but we may also reflect on our production ourselves.
Wait a minute. I might be writing trivial stuff here. Is not the same statement about production for perception true for almost anything? Do we all try to be the perfect wife or husband, or do we try to look like it? And when my daughter of 4 is told to clean up, I think she is trying very hard to look busy, while minimizing actual effort.
Do we act to look like we should? (source)
My mentor Ans said we all carry part of the world inside us just as much as we are part of the world. We adjust our behaviour for others. Gestures are no exception. And so, the importance of perception is nothing special for gestures.
In comparison with studies of production it is an empty statement to say perception is more important. True, without an underlying perceptual specification there can be no efficient communication. But we may get to a shared code only after many tried productions. And without production there is nothing to perceive. I may think I know exactly what a tree falling in the woods should sound like, but without an actual tree falling, can there be a debate?
