The most significant barrier between the deaf and the hearing is, generally, language. Signs and speech use different methods to express themselves; that divide alone makes the everyday translation of sign-to-speech, and speech-to-sign, particularly challenging.

Scientists at Microsoft and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, however, think they have found a way to bridge the gulf. And it involves the same technology used in video games. The Kinect Sign Language Translator project, released this week in a prototype form, aims to enable the hearing to understand sign language—and vice versa.

It works, essentially, like this: The deaf person signs, and the system renders both a written and a spoken translation of those gestures. (It uses Microsoft's Kinect to process the gestures of the signs.) The system also processes a speaking person’s words, converting them into readable text.

Which means that the interactions between the deaf and the hearing could soon become much less friction-filled than they've been in the past. A deaf doctor could communicate more fluidly, and more meaningfully, with a hearing patient. A hearing store manager could communicate with a deaf patron. The pair, in their interaction, wouldn't need extra knowledge of each others' languages; they would just need a tool to do the translating for them.