Towards Creating a Sign Language Interfacing System

Bifany Yi

In today’s information age, a text editor (such as MSWORD or vi) is an indispensable language tool and has greatly enriched the communication between people speaking traditional (spoken) languages. Although Sign Languages have been proven to be natural languages, there is no “Sign Language Editing” software available. Studies on spoken languages and sign languages (including gestures) suggest that both are representations of a single system with difference only in their production and perception modalities: oral and aural vs. gestural  and visual

With the advancement in the research areas that belong to the Human Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly that of Computer Graphics, “writing” in a Sign Language will not be an insurmountable task. In this talk, I will present my work on developing a Sign Language Interfacing System: the modeling of the human body, application of the hand constraints, design of virtual gestures, implementation of Sign Language linguistic parts, and the incorporation of these functions into a graphical user interface. This system, could not only provide a workable environment for Sign Language experts and users in creating Sign Language vocabulary and “writing” in a Sign Language, but also serve as application software for creating, editing, and recording the human virtual gestures.<