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Students in Denmark have created a way for web users to browse the internet even when they don’t have a screen – a landline phone that reads out the contents of web pages.
Called The Internet Phone, the marriage of old tech and new was the work of students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, who tweaked a classic rotary landline phone so it reads the contents of a website when prompted.
To do this, the creators also built a special cyber directory, similar to the Yellow Pages, which is used to find and then dial a 12-digit IP address to hear what’s on the page.
The device has already picked up a Core77 student design award in Denmark.
According to the developers, the aim of the phone is to use existing telephone behaviours many of us are used to in order to help demystify the workings of the internet, which often happen out of sight.
For example, the process of users having to look up an IP address in the directory to retrieve a website is much the same to how a web browser does so – looking up a web address from the Domain Name System (DNS) in a matter of seconds.
For those looking to dive even deeper into the nuts and bolts of the internet, The Internet Phone also comes with a developer mode that will read out the entire HTML content of a website.
