Towards Integrating American Sign Language into Virtual Reality

American Sign Language (ASL) has yet to be fully integrated into virtual reality environments, despite advances in digital ASL communication leveraging augmented reality and virtual human technologies. We describe a conceptual framework and software architecture for real-time translation between spoken & written English and ASL. In addition, we present an expert-validated prototype for SiGML, a computer-readable signwriting markup language, to fully-animated gestural translation using a photorealistic virtual human in an immersive virtual environment.