In this project the continued development of a mobile game called POPSign, designed to teach American Sign Language mainly to parents of Deaf children, is introduced.
The game could be downloaded in Google Play now. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.georgiatech.popsign |
DATE : Feb. 2016 - Apr. 2016 / Jan. 2016 - Present
ROLE : UI/UX designer, Graphic designer, Video editor TEAM : Josian Palusky, Shujun Bian, Youssif Hasssanein, Xiaoxuan Wang, Xue Zhao |
Celeste Mason, advised by Dr. Thad Starner, helped create an application called POPSign. POPSign was built using the open-source code from a popular Android “bubble bursting” game called Frozen Bubble. Mason found that users reported their POPSign experience as enjoyable overall, and were enthusiastic about using the game. Evaluations of POPSign still couldn’t provide evidence that sign recognition in the app would result in greater sign reproduction in the real world.
In Mason’s POPSign prototype, users are shown a set of multi-colored bubbles at the top of the game screen. Players must shoot a ball at a set of similarly colored balls to make them disappear. Each bubble has a text string inside of it, representing a sign language vocabulary word for that level. At the bottom of the screen, there is a looping ASL video. To know which color bubble will be shot, users must learn the definition of the sign language word being shown in the video. This hybrid game dynamic allows users to learn sign language while playing an addictive mobile game. |
The team's decision to use Unity 3D to develop the application came in part after negative experiences developing the application with the original Android code base. For the first few weeks of the project, the team explored the original Android POPSign code. After struggling with cryptic logic, deprecated tools, bugs, and difficulty transitioning the project into modern Android development environments, the team decided to start fresh, using Unity 3D. In Unity 3D, development takes place in both a scripting environment where code is written, and a visual environment where the elements and objects in the project can be manipulated through the Unity 3D GUI interface.
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