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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping to see something along the lines of ASL recognition. I strongly suspect that (an extension of) ASL could be an excellent way to interact with VR UIs. ASL natively exploits spatial context, which is what initially piqued my interest. Sadly this is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

As a bonus more people would learn ASL.

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What would be the advantage of ASL over speech recognition for VR?

I suppose if you were on an airplane you could avoid disturbing other passengers, but I don't expect many people to actually use VR on airplanes.

And using VR in planes will be strange enough for at least some years to not add moving your arms in all directions strange.

Stranger than speaking out loud with your headset on?

Well, if you're on an airplane, you could do neither of those things and just watch a movie.

And if you're not out in public, you can use speech recognition more easily than learning ASL.

The format of ASL is better suited for spatial problems. Speaking is one dimensional, it occurs at your mouth.

Could you please describe an example?

ASL recognition is an insanely difficult problem to solve because it requires solving hand, finger, and arm pose estimation with occlusion, which hasn't even been properly solved in VR, let alone through webcams.

Face/head too.

Yep, where is “AI” when you need it?

I think if you had automatic interpretation, removing much of the financial incentive to learn it, and even likely a large portion of the social incentive, far fewer people would learn it.

I’m confused. Is the statement that people learn ASL for money and some social kudos?

I'm not sure I understand; why would automatic interpretation reduce the incentive to learn ASL?

I learned ASL, as a hearing person, to be able to communicate with deaf friends anywhere and with my (hearing) spouse and other friends in noisy or large places. It's also a hedge against my future potential hearing loss from tinnitus.

Automatic interpreting wouldn't solve any of those and neither it nor automated captions take the place of human-understood interpreting. I think putting ASL in something like VR where it is more visible to the hearing world might broaden its reach?

You think if you make it a less commercially viable skill and make it easier to communicate with deaf people without learning it, more people will learn it? Or even the same number of people?

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