I'm a linguistics grad student at McGill University.
WTPh? (What the Phonics) is an interactive installation set in the touristic areas of Copenhagen. Street names in Denmark are close to impossible for foreigners to pronounce, so we did a little intervention :-)
We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing. We used Max/MSP and Arduino to build the installation.
This looks cool and also pretty effective. And potentially useful for vision-impaired people, in addition to tourists. I wonder if one could use signs like this for learning language more generally, like vocabulary items around a classroom or something.
