News Valve researching games for the deaf

Gordon's gonna be pissed

 

Cheers for those links wonka, I might have to discuss this with my girlfriend, she is currently doing a degree in childcare, so for her learning sign language wouldn't just "look good" but could have a real benefit to her and to any children she may have to deal with in future.

 

gabe newell is so fat when he gets up in teh morning he gets out of both sides of the bed.

 

Who cares, if it's going to be the same length as other episodes. Cannot believe some people I knew who blitzed through the episodes on easy when they were two years apart. Mad. If all this stuff turns it into an add-on and it lasts a tiny bit longer, fine. Plenty of other games to play whilst we wait, DNF, it certainly isn't.

 

I just had a clear vision: "in game character signs that the player needs to shoot the bad guy before he can fires his gu...." a damn! to late!

 

You are right but I believe it is one step closer.

 

I wanna see Familiy Guy's, Greased up Deaf Guy in episode 3

 

I wonder how good the motion capture tech would have to be for sign language to be intelligible. I suspect not very; it'd be the visual equivalent of an over-compressed MP3. I was involved in the design of a system to allow centralisation of BSL translators - that is, you call someone up over the internet, and talk via video link. We found that the usual video chat services often weren't good enough. Fluent BSL users often move very fast, just as fluent users of spoken language speak very fast, and the codecs have a lot of trouble keeping up; the result could sometimes be impossible to understand.

It'll be interesting to see how this affects animation data for realtime 3D rendering.

 

Mainly in alphabet signing, but many British Deaf people know how to sign-spell in ASL as well as BSL.

There are some drastic differences in conversational sign too, but for Deaf people these obstacles are easier to get around than for hearing people dealing with a different language. A lot of Deaf sign is fairly universal and discrepancies can be clarified with figurative signs. Even BSL can differ quite drastically across different areas of the UK (and even more with Ireland), and Deaf people tell me that they get around that with ease.

 

*Thumbs up*

Hopefully it works out, it would be cool to see the technology adapted to replace some of the captions as well.

 

Talk tables are used in a wide range of games, it shouldn't be much more of a problem to use sign tables so each different set of movements for each sign language standard could be used.

The problem with captioning for many is you can't read them very well on non-HD TVs (for games consoles).

Our game currently in development will use this method and we plan to allow the engine modules responsible for converting text (and later directly from speech recognition) into sign language to be used for other purposes. With a lot of help from users, we plan to add support for as many sign languages as possible.