Hasta La Gadget!

Going hands-free right now means one of three things – turn your handset’s speakerphone function on while letting everyone and their dog around you listen in on your conversation, use a wired hands-free kit that will definitely end up in a tangled mess when you stash the wired hands-free kit away, being extremely frustrating to untangle when the situation calls for it, and last but not least, scare people into thinking that you are talking to yourself or an imaginary friend while you gesticulate your arms all over the place in an animated conversation over a Bluetooth headset. NTT DoCoMo might have something right up your alley with a new futuristic looking glasses-type Head Mounted Device, calling it the Hands-Free Videophone. How blase, but I guess there is plenty of time to think up of a cool name later on.

NTT DoCoMo came up with this particular future glasses-type device because they feel that there definitely is a market for such a device. How does the Hands-Free Videophone work exactly? For starters, it will be able to capture the user’s face using all three cameras which are located at the left and right sides of the frames. Video will be sent to the other person simply by combining the pictures together using a pre-rendered 3D model of the user’s face.

NTT DoCoMo described, “Each camera has 720p resolution, and a fish-eye lens, with a 180-degree field of view. This is the High Definition picture currently being captured in real time. If you look at the face, you can see it’s really distorted, because the fish-eye lens is so close. The distortion is compensated, and the picture is combined with a 3D model of the person in the computer. Currently, priority is given to the part around the eyes. As you can see when the man closes his eyes, the eyelids and the corners of the eyes appear quite realistic. Such a level of realism is hard to achieve with models like CG-based avatars, where parts are overlaid on the face.”

That sounds like some serious bandwidth is required, although as at press time, the resolution is not quite high enough to be able to handle the mouth and upper body parts of the image, so what we see are are based on computer graphics. The face’s orientation is based on six-axis sensor data, and the motion of the mouth is based on audio data from the microphone. The ultimate aim for such a project? To recreate the whole face, without the help of any computer rendering. That ought to be still some time down the road, we think. How about you?

Source
[ NTT DoCoMo comes up with hands-free videophone copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

On October 11, NTT Docomo will start the Utsushite Honyaku service, which instantly translates foreign-language restaurant menus when you point a smartphone’s camera at them.
Utsushite Honyaku is a commercial version of a service that’s been available as a trial version. As well as menus, the new service can now handle signs. It works between Japanese and four languages: English, Korean and both simplified and traditional Chinese.
“For example, suppose you visit Korea, and you …

NTT Docomo and MasterCard Worldwide today announced a global business alliance for contactless payments via compatible DOCOMO smartphones. Aiming at a launch in the first half of the fiscal year ending in March 2014, the companies will expand DOCOMO’s iD mobile credit payment system for acceptance at MasterCard PayPass merchant locations around the world.
MasterCard’s innovative payment system, MasterCard PayPass, will be available to DOCOMO customers using smartphones equipped with a …

[CEATEC 2012] Last year, Docomo launched its menu translation app, but this year, their translation application can handle two use cases: conversations over the phone, and conversation side by side with someone speaking another language. At CEATEC 2012, we had an opportunity to try the conversation mode at CEATEC, and it worked quite well.

The concept is simple: two people speaking different language can communicate on a turn-by-turn basis, and the Docomo app translates each phrase in both visual and audio form in real-time. At any given time, each party can easily see if their phrase had been properly translated as every phrase always appear in both languages (see above). While this app may resemble Google Translate (Android version) on the surface, the Docomo translator user interface  is much better tuned for a two-person use, while Google Translate really works OK for a single person. I found the interaction with the Docomo app to be quicker and more natural than with Google Translate. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Docomo Shabette Robo keeps you in the know, Docomo helps commuters with one-handed smartphone/tablet use,

Improving something that works just fine is a difficult task and I must say that Docomo did a pretty descent job this year at CEATEC with their new hands-free video-conferencing prototype. The concept is simple, create an digitized avatar of yourself that will not only mimic your facial expression but also reproduce your surrounding environment without the needs for you to face a camera. Simple isn’t it? Well actually not really but Docomo came with something rather interesting in the …