Have you ever wanted to learn how to use Morse Code? Well, now you can thanks to a modified Google Glass headset.
Designed back in 1836, Morse Code played a vital role in early electronic communication, aviation and warfare. Today however, it has been replaced with bits and bytes to send messages over long distances, but it is still used among amateur radio operators or people with motion disabilities.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have reportedly built a system that can teach people Morse code while they are focusing on something else entirely. This can be achieved by a set of modified Google Glass, which has a built-in speaker and bone-conduction transducer that simulates the experience of being tapped on the side of the head.
The teaching process included participants playing games, while the speaker in the device named a letter and then heard the Morse code signal for it. Half of the group were also given taps representing the dots and dashes of Morse code between their temple and their ear. This resulted in those who got the taps were 94 percent accurate when writing a sentence that included every letter of the alphabet, and 98 percent accurate writing out the codes for each letter while those who didn’t get the taps were accurate only half the time, all under four hours.
Similar tests have been conducted before which have taught people braille and how to play the piano, and now the next step is to see if it can be used to teach how to type on the QWERTY keyboard. According to Thad Starner, who carries out the experiments, this might not result in people rushing to learn Morse code, but “It shows that passive haptic learning lowers the barrier to learn text-entry methods — something we need for smartwatches and any text-entry that doesn’t require you to look at your device or keyboard.”
© 2016 T-break Tech under contract with NewsEdge. -.
