About this project
Who We Are
We are two talented young robotics engineers (educated at Caltech and The University of Western Australia) who are building a comprehensive, accessible and searchable reference of hand gestures, including sign languages, from all around the world.
How It Began
The pinkyslang story started when we met in Italy. In our travels we both discovered that a single hand gesture may have wildly different meanings depending on where you are in the world. A gesture that an Indian might use to describe the act of eating, an Italian might use to question someone’s sanity. A raised fist might be a call to arms among communists, or someone from New Jersey fist pumping like a champ. This sort of information is never found in any phrasebooks, nor can you find this information in any single place online. And yet it's essential to cross-cultural communication. What gives?
What We Plan To Do
Our goal is to spend six months turning our proof-of-concept website, pinkyslang.com, into a comprehensive reference of hand gestures, including sign languages, from all around the world.
We want users to come to our site to discover new gestures, discover new meanings for gestures they already know, vote for their favorite meanings, and contribute to the community by submitting their own gestures and meanings, and that's just for starters.
Currently, the website relies exclusively on HTML5 technologies so fresh they haven't reached the most popular browsers. To reach a wider audience, we need to port the site to Flash, so that it can be used by Internet Explorer and Firefox users. We want to create applications for the iPhone, iPad, and potentially for Android, too.
Most importantly, we want to extend our model from a hand to two fully functioning arms and animate them so that our gestures have some context. We also want to make our body model code open source so that others can use our code for their own projects.
Finally, we pledge to keep the website advertising-free for 18 months.
Looking Forward
Looking beyond this project, our vision is to extend pinkyslang to incorporate many more forms of non-verbal communication, including facial gestures, poses, and gaits! But that's another story for another time.
What The Money Is For
We have the skills to take pinkyslang to the next level and make it into a useful and fascinating resource. Our backers will enable us to devote ourselves to the project full time for six months and get the project off the ground, and allow us to host the site without advertising for 18 months. It will also allow us to take the necessary steps to ensure that we are able to promote free speech without encouraging hate speech. Finally, we need to invite individuals from all over the world to contribute their cultural knowledge to our website, which will require advertising, most likely via social media.
Backers like you will help us make pinkyslang one of the world's best tools for non-verbal and cross-cultural communication. Back us now! (^_^)
Follow Us!
Follow us on Twitter @pinkyslang
FAQ
Have a question? If the info above doesn't help, you can ask the project creator directly.
2
Backers
$1,700
pledged of $20,000 goal
0
seconds to go
Funding Unsuccessful
This project reached the deadline without achieving its funding goal on December 6, 2010.
Pledge $10 or more Pledge $10 or more
and you will receive a thank you note signed by the pinkyslang.com team!
Pledge $25 or more Pledge $25 or more
and you will receive a signed thank you note AND a groovy pinkyslang.com sticker AND eternal recognition on our thanks page (unless you would prefer to remain anonymous!)
Pledge $50 or more Pledge $50 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND a hot pinkyslang.com t-shirt
Pledge $100 or more Pledge $100 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND a custom pinkyslang.com t-shirt with your name spelled out in the sign language of your choice! (AWESOME!)
Pledge $250 or more Pledge $250 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND early access to the iPhone app
Pledge $500 or more Pledge $500 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND live access to the private testing website where you can see the site evolve in real time
Pledge $1,500 or more Pledge $1,500 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND an Apple iPad preloaded with the pinkyslang app!
Pledge $3,000 or more Pledge $3,000 or more
and you will receive all the above stuff AND we will come to you to demonstrate and explain the robotics-inspired technology behind the project. (If you're outside the US, that's cool with us, but you'll have to pay for our airfares, too.)
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