A visual intercultural nonverbal communication system for the hearing impaired

With the development of CG technologies and multimedia technologies, more and more attention has been paid to building a virtual environment for the hearing impaired with the Internet. But the strong desire of the hearing impaired to communicate with the foreign people in other countries is often ignored. In this paper, we propose a real-time intercultural communication system by which the hearing impaired and the hearing people who are from different countries communicate with each other with realistic sensations in shared cyberspace. We model the 3D hierarchy avatars representing human beings in the virtual environment by VRML2.0 HANIM specification, discuss how to translate a natural language to parameterized presentation based on a 3D model, and then generate a visual sign language from the parameters. A CG animation synthesizing system is developed based on Japanese sign language (JSL) and Chinese sign language (CSL). The proposed system is a potential human-computer interaction (HCI) for international communication between the hearing-impaired and non-hearing-impaired people, and it is also suitable for interactive foreign sign language distance learning among different countries.