Rube Telephone
A Rube Goldberg machine that tangibly processes, translates, and often distorts conversation between two people.
How it works
(from left to right)
Human speech input
The user on the left speaks into the phone and the captured speech is converted to plain text.
Morse code
The text is then translated to Morse code.
Language translation
The input text is translated to a random language and then back to English.
Optical character recognition
The resulting translated text is printed on receipt paper and captured by a webcam, which performs optical character recognition to extract text from the image.
Computer speech output
The extracted text is read by a computer to the user on the right.
Made in collaboration with Aaron Montoya