Talking Points is a collaborative student project at the University of Michigan whose aim is to develop a prototype mobile urban orientation and contextual information system for blind as well as sighted people.
A mobile device is used to detect points of interest around a city, such as Ann Arbor, using either Bluetooth beacons placed in the environment or GPS coordinates. User generated-content about these location is presented to the user via either an accessible audio or visual modular interface. Information about the points of interests is stored in an online database. This information is retrieved by the cellular data connected mobile device when the user comes within close proximity to a “Talking Point.” The information for each Talking Point is maintained by the Talking Points community; anyone can add, modify, or delete information for each Talking Point.
For more information about the project you can download a short project presentation in PDF format.
For questions or feedback you can reach us at talkingpoints@umich.edu.
Posted December 8th, 2009
Students interested in joining the Talking Points project for Winter 2010 should look over these 2010 project planning slides and then fill out this form indicating which aspects of the project they’re interested in.
We are especially interested in recruiting folks who can work on the technical teams, including:
Symbian client (Python)
Android client (Java)
Web server (Ruby on [...]
Continue reading “Talking Points 2010 is seeking volunteers” »
Posted in Talking-Points |
Posted September 26th, 2009
Talking-Points was featured in the University of Michigan news program “Out Of The Blue” that showcases interesting projects at the University.
The feature was aired on the Big Ten Network and is now available online in the University of Michigan’s iTunes U under Campus > Out Of The Blue > Episode 7 Talking-Points.
You can also view [...]
Continue reading “Talking-Points on TV” »
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Posted April 12th, 2009
Talking Points placed second at the 2009 School of Information expoSItion! (check it out here)
expoSItion is an annual event where Master’s and doctoral students at the University of Michigan, School of Information are invited to showcase their work. This year, the showcase took place on March 23rd at the Michigan League, where a total of [...]
Continue reading “Second Place at the 2009 expoSItion!!” »
Posted in Talking-Points |
Posted March 12th, 2009
So, it has been a busy few weeks since my last post. On the one hand Jakob was given a few phones courtesy of Nokia thanks to help from Ben/SI Phd candidate who formerly worked at Nokia research. And on the other I was finally able to make contact with the Director of Nokia’s Developer [...]
Continue reading “Biz Dev-Update” »
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Posted March 9th, 2009
So far, the design team has been making a smooth progress to completing our semester plan: creating an intuitive and user-friendly interaction design for Talking Points.
We have conducted four interviews with individuals who are either blind or visually impaired. Based on our interviews, we have created two personas and two scenarios. The two personas include [...]
Continue reading “Design Team Update” »
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Posted March 1st, 2009
We have been working quietly for some time. Both Dan and I have been busy on our end trying to get a feel for what the aim of our business plan should really focus on. Do we focus on Talking Points as a purely assistive technology startup? If so, what about the potential revenue stream [...]
Continue reading “Biz Dev- Where are we?” »
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Posted February 18th, 2009
Hello everyone, we are the talkingpoints android team. We currently have three members: Jakob, Zhenan, and Sui. We are taking the EECS498 class which is about building mobile applications on iPhone or Android. Our goal is to implement the TalkingPoints prototype on Android with Java by the end of this semester.
We chose Android rather than [...]
Continue reading “Android Team - objectives” »
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Posted February 15th, 2009
We, the Sybmian development team now have a test device, a Nokia N95 running Symbian S60 3rd Edition, in our possession and we have started developing the prototype for this platform.
From talking to blind users we learn that pretty much every blind smartphone user has a screen reader software installed on their phone. Therefore we [...]
Continue reading “Symbian Development Under Way: Screen readers and GPS” »
Posted in Talking-Points |
Posted January 24th, 2009
The objective of the development team for this semester is to build a new improved version of the Talking-Points prototype from last year (build with standard Java on a OQO UMPC). One of the main goals was to choose a platform that would allow more (visually impaired) people to run and test our software on [...]
Continue reading “Next Talking-Points prototype build with Python for Symbian S60” »
Posted in Talking-Points |
Posted January 24th, 2009
We are inviting everybody that is interested in any of the areas connected to Talking-Points (accessibility, orientation, location-based systems, mobile development, etc.) to come to an informal brainstorming session in the Design Lab-1 between 1 and 6pm on Wednesday January 28.
Some questions that we will discuss very likely include:
How can technology help visually impaired and [...]
Continue reading “Brainstorming session, Wednesday January 28, 1-6pm” »
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