JOIN USWhen technology meets cause
For Vibushan Lakshminarayan and his former classmates at Amrita Engineering College, the idea to help deaf kids communicate without sign language, could not have come at a better time.
For these students, their end-of-course project was involved in just this. The thought provided a way to prove their grasp of the technology they had learnt. If that sounded ambitious, they were indeed able to develop a software that could help the deaf communicate using a software.
“We wanted to take up real-life issues and work on a solution,” Lakshminarayan says.
“We wanted to see if our work could make a difference to someone’s life. After all, isn’t that what technology is supposed to do?”
Their project, called The Sign Language Animator (TESLA), has a software to translate text and speech into sign through an “Avatar” — 3D digital animation character. “The deaf have been good at signing, but it can only be of use when face-to-face with someone. They can’t use it to communicate with someone far away or with the able-bodied,” says Deepak Aravind, who was also part of the project.
“If they were to communicate with another deaf person through the internet, they can’t use sign language. TESLA provides a way to do that.”
The idea came to them while visiting orphanages around their institution in Coimbatore, where they encountered “extremely talented” deaf children. While their ability found the thrust in their eagerness to learn and interact with everyone, the children had obvious limitations, which Deepak Aravind described as “more to do with our disability than theirs.”
Balaje, one of the team members, also had a personal reason to work on the project: “My grandma had a hearing impairment. So I fully understood what the children at the orphanage have to live with. It was tough — you have the urge to say something but you can’t. This understanding provided the trigger.”
With able support from their faculty, particularly from Harini, who helped them follow best practices while developing the software, the students gradually worked on a design and coded it into software.
“It required a lot of work,” admits Vibushan. “We had to make the text and speech components work for the software to get the input and allow a 3D character to provide the output. It needed hours of coding and testing and finally, we brought the performance to the most satisfactory level.”
The software was then taken to various organisations for field testing and feedback. The fact that it triggered plenty of excitement amongst children who used it was reason enough for the team members to consider it a success.
“That was our first goal,” says Vibushan. “We wanted it to work and it did. Of course, it needed a lot of sandpapering, but it worked!”
As if to confirm its efficacy, the software received many accolades and acknowledgements in contests. Besides winning the TCS Best Project Award in 2008, the software has also grabbed the Melbourne Student Entrepreneurs Challenge and a 10,000 USD cash prize at the ICT Geelong Invention Forum with the opportunity to attend an all-sponsored venture capital and entrepreneurship programme at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and a 12-month-long mentoring programme to commercialise the software.
The students, who have long passed out of college, continued to work on the software even as they found jobs in different places, thanks to the internet and other means of instant communication.
They are on the verge of seeing the software transform from a project to product: Commercialisation Australia, an organisation that launches innovative products, has come forward to launch the software in the market.
“The software has a place in all our lives,” says Krithika Thangavelu, a team member.
“Throughout the development, we worked very closely and were inspired by the challenge than overwhelmed by it.”
Certainly, several college students searching for ideas to work on would find inspiration in the success of this team.