MMS Player: an open source software for parametric data-driven animation of Sign Language avatars

TL;DR

MMS Player is an open source tool that synthesizes sign language animations from a novel, detailed representation format, enhancing expressiveness and timing accuracy for sign language avatars.

Contribution

It introduces MMS, a new sign language representation format, and provides an open source software implementation for generating animations from this format.

Findings

Supports rendering as videos and export in 3D formats

Enhances sign language expressiveness with timing and inflection details

Accessible via command line and HTTP API

Abstract

This paper describes the MMS-Player, an open source software able to synthesise sign language animations from a novel sign language representation format called MMS (MultiModal Signstream). The MMS enhances gloss-based representations by adding information on parallel execution of signs, timing, and inflections. The implementation consists of Python scripts for the popular Blender 3D authoring tool and can be invoked via command line or HTTP API. Animations can be rendered as videos or exported in other popular 3D animation exchange formats. The software is freely available under GPL-3.0 license at https://github.com/DFKI-SignLanguage/MMS-Player.