Photos: Microsoft's Imagine Cup finals

Jul 11, 2012

The top projects from this year's dev-fest.

Team quadSquad: Computer Academy "Step" Donetsk, Ukraine

Team quadSquad from the Ukraine took out the top prize at this year's Imagine Cup. Developed using Bing, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, 'Enable Talk' allows people who cannot talk to verbally communicate with the rest of the world via a pair of sensory gloves and a smartphone application. The custom-built gloves are equipped with 15 flex sensors and a microcontroller that continuously recognises sign language patterns, which are then transmitted via Bluetooth to a smartphone that uses the Microsoft Speech API and Bing API to translate the signs into audio.

"The gloves capture the hand movement pattern and finger gestures," explained team member Maxim Osika. "The data is transmitted to the mobile device where the analysis happens ... the application on the smartphone is then able to produce the sound for those signs."
One of the benefits of the system is its flexibility: because the software is user-taught, you can define the type of gestures or signs you want to use. This means the user does not need to be proficient in traditional sign language.

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