Dr. Erdefi Rakun Develops Mobile Application to Translate Text into 3D Animation SIBI for the Deaf
Lecturer of the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia (Fasilkom UI) Dr. Ir. Erdefi Rakun, M.Sc., along with the research team from the Machine Learning & Computer Vision (MLCV) Lab, and the Information Retrieval – Natural Language Processing (IR-NLP) Lab have just released a text translation application into 3D animation for SIBI. The translation application is available on Playstore (Android OS) and App Store (iOS). The technology used to develop the translation application is image processing, animation creation, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and mobile application.
This is an English version of the following article.
There are several features available in the application, namely a feature to adjust the animation speed so that users can observe SIBI movements according to their needs; a feature to select 3D animation characters according to user preferences (male or female); zoom in or zoom out feature; a feature to rotate the 3D model, so that movements can be seen from various directions (left, right, and front); and a help feature as a guide to using the application. In addition to being used as a translator of Indonesian sentences into 3D SIBI animations, this application can also be used as a digital dictionary of all the movements in the SIBI dictionary and is also useful as a tool to learn how to sign SIBI correctly.
The development of this SIBI 3D text-to-animation translator application involved teachers and students from the Santi Rama Special School (SLB); SLB Negeri 3 Jakarta; SLB Negeri 12 Jakarta; and students of Fasilkom UI from both Bachelor and Master levels (Wikan Setiaji, IGM Surya A. Darmana, Sultan Muzahidin, Misael Jonathan). The application development team was also assisted by Arya Sidharta, who helped perfect the Movement database, and Narendra Arief, who perfected the mobile application. This 3D text-to-animation translator application is expected to help the deaf and mute interact in everyday life. Dr. Erdefi also hopes that what he has done with his team can be useful for the millions of deaf and mute people in Indonesia, in particular.
The Indonesian Sign Language System (SIBI) application can be downloaded via the following link: