Another slightly-inaccurate article
David Pescovitz, “Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled”:
Currently, the best captioning technology offered by some movie theaters is Rear Window, a scrolling LED display
Nothing scrolls. It’s pop-on captions only.
mounted at the rear of the theater that displays mirror-images of the captions already embedded in Hollywood films.
They’re not “embedded,” and they’re certainly not embedded in all Hollywood films, as implied. Captions and descriptions reside on a separate CD-ROM that can be played by itself, or its contents can be copied to a hard drive. In either event, the player, reading timecodes that are embedded in Hollywood films (on the frame margins), and triggers caption display and description playback. There are no separate prints, and in fact you can use any print you want of a specific movie.
Hard-of-hearing audience members watch the film through transparent reflective panels mounted on the chairs.
They’re translucent. They could be transparent for reasons of optics, but they aren’t. They’re smoked plexiglas.
“It’s awkward,” Mitchell says. “Even if the text is provided on the screen itself (at the bottom), you have to constantly look at the words and you miss the picture.”
That’s disingenuous. Any offscreen captioning system would generate the same complaint, as would all captioning systems, period, if you think about it.
Anyway, since I’ve watched more movies with Rear Window captioning than anyone else, I can categorically deny that “[i]t’s awkward.” If you’re in a good seat near the display, and if the reflector is in good shape, and if the LED display hasn’t been beaten to shit, the system works extremely well. It’s not very good for neophytes, though, or anyone with presbyopia, since it becomes difficult to switch focus between the captions and the movie.
The Center’s solution is simple, yet effective. Captions already embedded in films are transmitted to a PDA,
They’re not embedded in the film.
either belonging to the patron or borrowed from the theater. A tiny monitor that clips on any pair of eyeglasses virtually suspends the caption in the wearer’s field-of-vision.
This is the same as the Virtual Vision approach that was tried and rejected. You know, two different Technology Review articles have run on this topic, one of them written by me. (The other one, which I have here in front of me, is “Wireless for the Disabled,” December 2003/January 2004 [abstract], with no byline.)
Of course, live settings require a typist to provide the captioning.
No, a stenotypist. A stenocaptioner. CART, if you want to be more precise.
As speech recognition software improves though, it’s easy to envision a PDA-based portable captioning system so hearing-impaired individuals can read their real-world conversations without breaking eye contact.
Two generations hence, possibly, yes.
In that case, though, how does the “hearing-impaired” person talk back? Isn’t this the converse of reading out phrases from a foreign-language phrasebookbook, but not understanding what the natives say to you?
By the way, until I try this system and know it works, I think the idea of staring down in your lap at a PalmPilot to read captions is a non-starter. How is this really better than Rear Window? It apparently is not. I’m sure our dear British friends will lap it up, though, as is their wont.
See also
- Wearable Captioning homepage
- CSUN presentation
- Behind the booth
- Test of Closed-Caption Systems at Langley Theater