Journamalism

  1. Students from the Berghs School of Communication post this video demonstrating a purported new service from Google, Google Gesture, which through tendon- and ligament-sensing armbands, wireless networking, and an Android app, translates sign language into verbal speech accurately and in real-time.

  2. Berghs is a Swedish school that bills itself as “the best advertising school — in the world!”

  3. Note that the video was posted to Vimeo, not YouTube, by Berghs, not Google.

  4. Emailed by a Reddit user, one of the students who made the video describes it as “completely fictional”. So it’s not just merely a concept, it’s a concept Google itself had nothing to do with. A (well-done) student exercise in advertising, not computer science, biomechanics, or language translation.

  5. Mashable runs a story treating it as a real thing. (My favorite: “A release date for the app has not yet been announced.”)

  6. Android Central plays along. They’ve since updated the article to acknowledge that “it now seems more likely that this is a mock-up project from the marketing students at Berghs”, but the original headline (as evidenced by the URL slug) read “googles-developed-arm-bands-can-translate-sign-language-real-time”.

★ Saturday, 21 June 2014