A 3D conversational agent for presenting digital information for deaf people

Abstract

Sign languages appear to be the major communication tool for the deaf community. As a minor community, Vietnamese deaf people often have to rely on a small numbers of interpreters who are hearing people knowing sign language in order to communicate with hearing people. It would be very beneficial for deaf as well as hearing people to develop an automated translation system between spoken/written languages and sign language. In this paper, we present our attempt to graphically decompose the gestures in Vietnamese Sign Language so that they can be easily synthesized in a 3D conversational agent. In order to describe the signs in Vietnamese Sign Language, we proposed an animation-level markup language. Based on this, we presented our 3D conversational agent for presenting multi-modal information for deaf people. The 3D agent can assist deaf people easier and in a more natural way. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.