An interactive sign language teaching program created by a team of computer science students from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, has been selected as Ireland's first ever entry into the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championships, an international technology competition to be held this year in August in Seoul, South Korea.
The project, which was created by postgraduate student Dan Kelly and undergraduates Mark Clerkin, Cathal Coffey and Eric McClean, was inspired by Mr McClean's struggle to communicate with a hearing-impaired friend. The problem, the team thought, was that finding the time - and the resources - to learn sign language can be a challenge.
"The aim of the project is to teach sign language to people who might have deaf relatives, neighbours or friends," Mr Kelly said.
"It's for people who don't have time to go to night classes, because that's really the only opportunity to learn sign language."
Mr Kelly had done other work in the area of motion capture, a process by which a computer program is able to record and analyse human movement. The team built upon that experience to create a system that demonstrates sign language and is then able to "see" the user sign back and grade the performance through an inexpensive web camera.
According to the students' mentor, NUI Maynooth lecturer Tom Lysaght, the team's challenge was to make the program as engaging as possible.
"They wanted to make it fun so they built a sort of computer game, with a graphic that would show you the sign language and then tell you how good you are at it, with some games to test you," he said.
As a part of the creative process, the team took their ideas to students and teachers at St Joseph's School for Deaf Boys in Cabra, Dublin, where they were met with an enthusiastic response.
"They asked if there would be a market for the product and we determined that there would be because there's quite a number of deaf students and deaf people across the country," said Flor O'Mahony, a teacher at St Joseph's.
"It would be the first time where software would be developed and could actually read someone's signs, which could be a great motivation for hearing people to learn sign language."
A prototype version of the project took first place at the Ireland final of the Image Cup competition in late April, which qualified the Maynooth team for participation in the August final in South Korea. The team will spend the summer completing the project and preparing a presentation that they'll share with academic and business leaders along with other budding technology developers from around the globe.
The winners will take home a cash prize, but Mr Kelly said his team was just as excited about the opportunity to share their vision and potentially interest someone in producing it on a large scale.
"It's about the experience we'll have and the people we're going to meet," he said.
"It's possible that we'll be able to make it a commercial product, but at the moment, we're just trying to get it working."