Based on data published by the World Health Organization an estimate of 1 in 1000 babies is born Deaf. 30 out of every 1000 children have hearing loss and 12 out of every 1000 person's under the age of 18 is Deaf. That leaves a massive proportion of people with a hearing impediment who do not use sign language struggling in social interaction and suffering from emotional distress, and an even larger proportion of Hearing people who cannot communicate with those of the deaf community. 900,000 people in the UK are severely or profoundly deaf and based on a study by Action On Hearing Loss UK in 2013 only 17 percent of this population, can use the British Sign Language (BSL). To address this issue and close the communication gap between able hearing people and people with a hearing impediment a Serious Game (SG) has been developed at the University of Westminster supporting adult learning a range of letters of the BSL. This project marriages video with Virtual Reality (VR) and leap motion technology and provides an educational resource that allows learning, training and assessment. Current study involving 24 users comparing this educational resource to traditional video highlighted the success of the latter. The proposed project will extend the current SG by covering all the signs of the BSL, integrating image processing for training and speech recognition for assessment to develop an effective educational resource supporting users learning BSL. The project will be scalable to support Uzbek and other sign language in the future.
