Report in the San Jose Mercury News on some of the more promising new mobile technologies shown off at the DemoMobile conference last week. We’d already mentioned several of them here on Gizmodo, like that wireless cellphone headset from Aura Communications which uses magnetic induction rather than Bluetooth, or Brother’s portable Bluetooth printer, but there was one product that somehow escaped our attention, an unusual new software application for cellphones from a company called Pulse Entertainment:
[Y]ou take a cell-phone photo of a friend or pet; outline the head, eyes and mouth; and make it appear to say pretty much anything you want in English or Japanese. Think of it as a low-cost, low-bandwidth way of doing a talking head in streaming video, without actually doing streaming video. Some of the more skeptical attendees at the DemoMobile conference said there’s no obvious practical use for it — but come on. Did that stop Tamagotchi or cell phone cameras?
The scary thing is, do you really think you could talk with someone on the phone, knowing that they could have an animated dog mouthing your words on their cellphone screen?
