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Mocaplab makes motion capture.
It's a complicated term.
Simply put, we are movement engineers,
as there are sound engineers, we record, we edit,
and we restore movement as a sound engineer
records sound, edits and replays it.
We record,
we edit and restore movement.
We do this for cinema, video games, VR, sports, dancing.
Now we are going to do it for LSF.
Sign language is exciting to work with.
It's a very fine, very rich matter.
We use it to communicate, so it's one of the most beautiful movement to study.
First, you have to record it. It's complicated.
We need to record the finger movement
that's very fine-motion.
Hands are very complicated to record. It's very subtle.
So we had to record the quality
of the hand movement, but also the face,
whose deaf people use enormously, the eyes, the body,
and record it in a very fine way, and all in parallel,
because the hands have shapes, the body moves, the face too.
It's kind of a multi-track record
of what a deaf can produce in sign language.
And then we're going to create a bunch of little samples
of movements all over the place to recombine them
and make it an avatar that signs pretty well.
Recombining all these movements is not easy.
From this multitrack,
you have to mix all the movements
to be fluid, coherent.
It's a big part of the job.
We had to develop a tool to record LSF very finely.
It took 10 years, but now we have a tool that records.
We record corpora,
a lot of little examples of sign language,
our partners mix them, and we have to resynthesize them
to make a sentence in sign language that is fluid
at all levels.
And because it's full of different tracks and timelines,
we developed this tool to mix them again.
And then LSF experts give their feedback to improve the tool.
Then we'll evaluate the quality of the result
and ask the deaf what they think.
It's kind of like voice synthesis a long time ago.
The first one was complicated, hard, even unpleasant.
But it was transmitting information.
We wonder if the deaf
will be happy with what we provide or if they'll be disappointed
if the result is not very fluid
or not respecting their language well.
It's this first feedback that's the main expectation of the project
that will allow us, hopefully, to continue to improve the tool,
even though having a fluid, perfect sign language,
is a long-term job.
SYSTRAN