Exploring the Potential of Immersive Virtual Environments for Learning American Sign Language

Sign languages enable effective communication between deaf and hearing people. Despite years of extensive pedagogical research, learning sign language online comes with a number of difficulties that might be frustrating for some students. Indeed, most of the existing approaches rely heavily on learning resources uploaded on websites, assuming that users will frequently consult them; however, this approach may feel tedious and uninspiring. To address this issue, several researchers have started looking into learning sign language in a game-based environment. However, the majority of the existing work still relies on website-based designs, with only a very few proposed systems providing an immersive virtual environment, and there are no user studies comparing website-based and immersive virtual environments. In this paper, we present an immersive environment for learning numbers 0-9 in American Sign Language (ASL). Our hypothesis is that an immersive virtual environment can provide users with a better learning experience and that users will show a higher level of engagement compared to website-based learning. We conducted a questionnaire-based user survey, and our initial findings suggest that users prefer to learn in an immersive virtual environment.