Tuesday, August 26, 2008

NEW SOFTWARE TO ALLOW SIGN LANGUAGE ON CELLPHONE

The Times of India (Delhi edition)

Deaf people, who communicate through their cellphones using SMS messages, can now interact in their native or American sign language, thanks to a new software developed by engineers that has led to demonstration of two way video communication. “A lot of people are excited about this. The point is you will be able to communicate in your native language.

For deaf people that’s American Sign Language.” principal investigator Eve Riskin, a University of Washington professor of electrical engineering said. Video is much better than text-messaging because it’s faster and it’s better at conveying emotion, said Jessica DeWitt, a UW undergraduate in psychology who is deaf and is a collaborator on the MobileASL project.

A large part of her communication is with facial expressions, which are transmitted over the video phones. Low data transmission rates on US cellular networks, combined with limited processing power on mobile devices, have so far prevented real-time video transmission with enough frames per second that it could be used to transmit sign language


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