Rube Telephone
A Rube Goldberg telephone that uses Morse code, language translation and optical character recognition to propagate speech from one person to the other. Results may vary. Created by Chino Kim and Aaron Montoya Software used: Arduino MaxMSP OSC Node.js Socket.IO p5.js p5.speech Google Translate API newOCR.com Python AppleScript Special thanks: Shir David Sehyun (AV) Kim Eve Weinberg Aaron Parsekian Sam Lavigne Joe Mango Eric Rosenthal Daniel Shiffman Tom Igoe
ITP Winter Show 2015
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