Digital humans that sign make more content accessible to the deaf community

By Matthew Griffin Intelligence and the Senses 25th June 2021

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Accessibility is a cornerstone of our society but for many people it’s still a challenge.

Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog.

In what seems to be a world first New Zealand tech company have announced that they’ve been using Epic’s photorealistic Unreal gaming engine to create unbelievably realistic digital humans that are capable of translating a variety of languages and media types into sign language for the deaf community.

In a world first researchers created a digital cell that grows like the real thing

Furthermore, it turns out that thanks to Unreal’s new MetaHuman Creator that lets developers make believable human characters in “less than an hour” their characters are about to get a huge upgrade.

The new MetaHuman Creator is like a character creator in a game, but with a much wider range of capabilities, and once that character is done being made it comes fully rigged and ready to be animated in Unreal Engine. And the results are so good that some people think it’s a little creepy.

Kara’s new technology platform

Epic released two sample characters created in MetaHuman Creator, and both of them are so realistic that it’s hard to tell that they’re not even real people.

World first as scientists re-grow a frogs amputated leg using a "silk bioreactor"

While games are the most likely application of the new tool Kara Technologies had other ideas for Epic’s new toy. Kara is the New Zealand-based company that developed Niki, their first digital human that can translate “a variety of media content such as video, audio, or text into a signed language.”

Niki isn’t just some avatar moving her hands, though. Niki’s facial expressions are fully animated with hundreds of micro-expressions – something that’s a really important factor when it comes to communicating with the deaf community.

It also looks like Niki might have some new competition after Kara released an updated version of its signing avatar using one of the MetaHuman models that Epic released with MetaHuman Creator, and it took less than a week for this incredible animation to be born.

Robot surgeon STAR bests its human counterparts in world first

Kara hopes that MetaHumans may one day lead to an even better signing avatar than Niki that could include a fuller range of human expressions and reduce project turn-around by as much as 80% – but while that’s great the real beneficiaries of the new project will be the deaf community who all of a sudden will have access to tons of new content that companies previously didn’t provide signing services for.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

15 times author of the hit series the Codex of the Future series Matthew's ability to identify, track, and explain the impacts of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends on global business, culture, and society has earned him a powerful reputation and a roster of clients that include royal households, world leaders across the G7, G20, and G77, and many of the world's most recognised and exceptional organisations including ABB, Accenture, ABN Amro, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi Group, Coca Cola, Deloitte, Dentons, Disney, Dow, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Microsoft, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Nokia, Paramount, PepsiCo, PWC, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, T-Mobile, UBS, Visa, WIRED, WPP and hundreds of others.

Matthew is regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, and his mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.