Deaf Telephony Project

The Deaf Telephony Project is a small ad-hoc unofficual research group within the UCT Computer Science dept..

Our main aim is to develop some kind of mobile deaf communications application to be run on either cellphones or PDA's. We aso want to research different UI's to see what would be the most appropriate.

Participants

• Prof Edwin H. Blake - Supervisor
• Joel Sangster - Student

Initial ideas and discussion

At the initial meeting we drew up a few objectives and points of information that needed to be researched. Below is a copy of those notes:

• Research in the N96's technical capabilities
• Investigate what languages Symbian supports and find SDK's and other needed info
• Develop some kind of testbed for our application (possibly in C, but some of my initial investigation indicates that Sybian S60 supports C++ as well)
• Research and test the data transfer speeds of 3G
• Possibly look into appropriate codecs (as needed)
• Brainstorm ideas for the UI
• Test the phones TV-out capabilities for use in our app
• Test both camera qualities for use in our app
• Take a visit to the deaf center to capture some source/example footage of signing

Possible problems

• Should TV-out prove not feasible, the small 2.8" screen limits the amount of on-screen controls we can add to the UI
• We might need to develop some kind of plastic stand or something to prop the phone against
• Connectivity with 3G

After a subsequent meeting a more specific initial set of objectives were defined due to participants' availability. Joel Sangster was the only student available to do the initial "research" in the first month. There are the objectives.

• The primary aim for the next few weeks is to have some kind of working prototype application that can at least, get a hold of the camera and capturing both video and single frames.
• All research needs to be "documented" with this wiki being the primary form thereof.

Platform and framework

After some decision making, it was decided that the first attempt at this application would be on some form of mobile phone running Symbian. This was mostly due its its popularity and wide-spread use amongst mobile smartphones. The Nokia range of smartphones almost all implement an application framework called s60 or "Series 60". In support of this we purchased two new Nokia N96 phones for use in testing and development.

The primary development language used in s60 is C++ with an extensive backbone and API. This is also well supported within the Nokia development community through easily downloadable SDK's (links found below), a free IDE called Carbide C++ and many beginner video tutorials.

Through researching and attempting development, I've found that there is a lot of help with the initial stages of setting up and getting a development environment runnning. There is also a lot of advanced help through the form of developer forums etc.. But there is very little documention thats useful in learning the actual framework and learning the differences between conventional C++ and the proprietry "Symbian OS C++". The majority of this wiki article will be a HOWTO of setting up the development environment and some basic explanation of example code. I've have found this beginner understanding to be the largest hurdle so far, so the point of documenting this is to jump-start the dev process that will be followed once we re-convene to continue development.

External Links

Interesting reading:

• [http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/07/symbian_its_role_in_the_mobile.html Symbian — Its Role in the Mobile Jigsaw - an interesting article
• Wiki arcticle on MPEG-4 Part 10 - the video codec supported by the N96

Great places to start

• Forum.Nokia.com
  • Getting Started
  • Symbian resource and landing page
  • Open C/C++ landing page
  • Many useful tutorial videos
  • Carbide c++ (the free IDE) resource and landing page
• S60 Developer's Library (c++)

Forums and dev. communities

• Symbian Developer Network
• Forum.Nokia.com community wiki
• www.newlc.com - Many useful tutorials and developer arcticles