Access on Main Street

The Hand-e-holder attaches to your iPad and then wraps around your hand so you can hold the iPad one-handed and grip-free. Potentially useful for people who find the iPad difficult to hold and operate. But shouldn’t it be called the Hand-i-holder?

OhGizmo: Hand-e-holder makes your arm the iPad stand

Turns out the Nabaztag bunny’s story isn’t over after all…after the original manufacturer, Violet, filed for bankruptcy, the little rabbit became Real got bought up by Mindscape and released in a new version called–oh please–Karotz. In addition to its traditional roles such as reading RFID tags, new capabilities will include a webcam for face recognition.

MIT has come up with a prototype for an invisible mouse. You cup and move your hand as you would with a standard mouse, but instead of a physical piece of plastic, there’s a camera and light source that track your movement. To click, just press on the table. Potentially useful for people who have difficulty with grasping.

Crunchgear: O hai, I has an invisible mouse

Balabolka adds new features to free text-to-speech for Windows.  You can import all kinds of files, set the voice characteristics you want, change the speed and emphasis, etc., then export the results as audio files, say for an mp3 player.  Note that this is not a screen reader — it’s a utility for producing better-than-average synthetic speech for almost any text you have.

Balabolka Enhances Windows Text-to-Speech with Reading Styles and Audio Export

Turns out the human ear doesn’t change much over the course of the human lifetime, plus each pair is unique. That makes your auricles and lobes prime targets for biometric systems. Assuming you still have ‘em, of course.

Gizmodo: Clean Your Ears Because Airport Security Might Soon Be Scanning Them

We’ve covered augmented reality interfaces, where a video image is superimposed with additonal content, such as the history of a building your camera is pointed at.  Now researchers at the Technische Universität in Ilmenau, Germany are going the other way — removing objects from the camera’s output, in real time.  This might work well as a wayfinding interface for people with low vision or cognitive disabilities.  Imagine a street scene with all the signs still there, but none of the bustling, distracting people.  Like a 10 megapixel neutron bomb.

Gizmodo: Magic Software Eliminates Objects From Reality Itself

You’ve got a Nokia N8 phone. You’ve got a TV or other display with an HDMI interface. You plug the former into the latter, and voila: an instant magnified, touchscreen-style interface for a limited number of functions, such as running a slide show or operating a calculator. More capabilities to come, we hope.

MobileCrunch: Nokia turns any display into a touchscreen with “Plug and Touch.”