Avatars on Portuguese sign language

Abstract

The Portuguese Sign Language (PSL) is the sign language used in Portugal by the depth community. This language has a lexicon, plus syntactic and semantic rules such as any oral language. This work's motivation was based primarily on two aspects: the PSL qualified interpreters are scarce, and the most common digital method to present sign language, namely the video with humans, it is a difficult medium to edit and reuse. After said that, it makes perfectly sense to use a deaf-signer virtual human capable of reproduce this language. With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect, the motion capture sessions turn out to be a easiest and more accessible process than the conventional systems. Our research involves this low-cost technology to support the animation of a virtual human. This paper describes an application within the education domain, which uses an avatar as a PSL virtual interpreter. The virtual signer objective is to teach basic concepts of PSL in a fun and easy manner, targeted especially to children. The tool allows the translation of Portuguese words to PSL, it allows to combine signs into simple sentences, and also illustrates several grammatical concepts such as: negative or interrogative sentence construction; gender and plural marking; and verbal time conjunction. It was included as well, a didactic component to test the user's knowledge, through a simple game of association between words and signs. The evaluation results shows that the application could contribute to the PSL education, and shows that avatars are useful in the sign language context.