HamNoSys For Avatars

HamNoSys has been used as the basis for Signing Gesture Markup Language (SiGML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML) which can be used to generate an animated signing avatar from input text. Because HamNoSys describes the visual phonetics of signs, rather than any language-specific (for example semantic) information, it is ideally suited for creating signing avatars which sign in any language. The eSIGN editor has been created for this purpose. It provides the user with an economic approach to creating signed sequences, by selecting signed sentences sign-by-sign from the lexicon, and to applying morphological changes to individual signs or strings of signs as necessary. The user can send the text to the avatar at any time during writing, to watch the animation and check it for accuracy.

The advantages of using a signing avatar over a video recording of a real signing human include the possibility of changing the avatar’s appearance to take cultural sensibilities into account, and the potential for lower-bandwidth communication. It is possible to use a motion capture system to create an avatar based on the record of real human motions in a 3D space, and this has been done, for example in the Visicast project. However, such a method requires expensive, specialized motion capture equipment to record the proper data, which is not required by a symbolic notation conversion method. In addition, this method allows for easy editing, and a higher degree of accuracy and consistency than would be achieved from a motion capture system. Notation conversion methods are still very much in the process of being developed, and one criticism of them is that the avatar’s movements look too robotic. Nevertheless, the advantages of such a method are felt by many to outweigh this.

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.