Drinking Cup of a Traveling Researcher

From a distance, these two Styrofoam cups could pass as models of a coffee-to-go cup and its smaller expresso version; but, in fact, they were both produced the same size. The duo returned from a research trip with the informatics expert, Alexander Waibel, from KIT to the Titanic shipwreck in 2022. One of the cups took the journey to 3,800 meters depth in a container attached to the outside of the submarine and was compressed to half its original size by the water pressure. Next to the printed logo of the travel agent is added by hand a line drawing of the sunk luxury liner, KIT’s logo, the traveler’s name, and the date of the dive. Although this souvenir design seems somewhat sentimental — this trip pursued serious research interests. Anyone who has sat through interminable video conferences during the Covid epidemic knows how important sufficient volumes of data are for this form of communication. From the Titanic wreck, Waibel and his team experimented purposefully under conditions that were brought to extreme limits. Since radio signals don’t penetrate through the almost four-kilometer-thick water layer, the communication was based on sound waves. Sonar signals have a range of many kilometers but their data transmission rate is far removed from what a normal video conference needs. To get through this bottleneck, the speech recordings by the conference participants in the submarine were automatically transformed into text and text-only excerpts were sent as data. At the surface, video avatars then converted these excerpts from the speakers inside the submarine back into audiovisual content. This technology developed at KIT generates videos using automatic speech recognition, conversion, and lip-movement synchronization to make this possible. kn