Signing Avatars

Benefits And Uses Of Signing Avatars

Like videos of live signers, signing avatars allow for direct presentation of ASL in its dynamic visual form, eliminating the need for closed-captioned text, awkward representations of signs, or static sign images. Compared to video, animation technology has the following fundamental advantages.

(a) 3-D animation offers great control over the visualization of the signs; the point of view of the virtual camera that renders the signing character and the location of the character in relation to the background can be optimized to enhance clarity. (b) The speed of the signing motion can be adjusted to the ASL proficiency of the user, of great importance for children who are learning ASL. (c) Individual animated signs can be linked together smoothly to form sentences, without abrupt jumps or collisions as would happen when concatenating video clips. (d) 3D animation allows for user programmability; unlike videotapes and CD-ROMs of video clips for which programmability is very limited (clips can be composed but with great difficulty and discontinuous results). Programmability can be utilized for: generating infinite number of drills; unlimited text encoding; real time translation; limitless combinations of signs. For example, manual signs and facial expressions can be combined in any desired manner under program control. (e) Animations can be stored and transmitted remotely using only a small fraction of the storage and bandwidth costs of comparable video representations.