Innovative and Creative Developements in Multimodal Interaction Systems

Abstract

Sign language is the hearing impaired form of communicating with other people, including listeners. Most cases, impaired people have learned sign language form childhood. The problem arises when a listener comes in contact with an impaired person. For instances, if a couple has a child which is impaired, the parents find a challenge to learn the sign language. In this article, a new playful approach to assist the listeners to learn sign language is proposed. This proposal is a serious game composed of two modes: School-mode and Competition-mode. The first offers a virtual school where the user learns to sign letters and the second offers an environment towards applying the learned letters. Behind the scenes, the proposal contains a sign language recognition system, based on three modules: 1 – the standardization of the Kinect depth camera data; 2 – a gesture library relying on the standardized data; and 3 – the real-time recognition of gestures. A prototype was developed – Kinect-Sign – and tested in a Portuguese Sign-Language school and on eNTERFACE’13 resulting in a joyful acceptance of the approach.