[09]hackathon

★ Spoken words → silent hands

Hack Helix

Participant

Back at Thapar two weeks after Eclipse, this time for Hackfest'26. The problem statements were handed out on the spot, and we had 24 hours. We built Sign Setu, which turns spoken English or Hindi into Indian Sign Language, signed by a 3D avatar right in the browser. Our friends had teams all around us, and it was amazing fun.

When
April 2026
Where
TIET, Patiala, Punjab
Hosted by
Helix 2026 · Hackfest'26 · Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology
Format
in person · 24 hours
Track
Problem statement revealed on the spot
BUGHACKERS 404 at Hack Helix

[01]The squad

BUGHACKERS 404

  • Govind Jindal← that's me
  • Lakshman Bansal
  • Piyush Sharma
  • Dev Kabir Deora
  • Deepanshu Arora
  • Asmit Chitkara

[02]The rounds

  1. Round 1

    The reveal

    No problem statement in advance. The statements were revealed at the venue, we picked one, and the 24-hour clock started.

    Statement picked ✓

  2. Round 2

    The 24 hours

    Landing page, backend, NLP, the 3D viewer, then a morning of merging, fixing and README-writing.

    📜 Participated

[03]What we built

Sign Setu

Sign Setu home page

Running live, right here. Click around.

The full demo: voice, text, audio and video in, signs out.

  • Four ways in

    Live voice, typed text, an audio file or a video upload. Speech is transcribed with AssemblyAI, and FFmpeg pulls the audio out of videos.

  • English and Hindi

    Hindi input is translated first, so both languages end up in the same sign pipeline.

  • ISL grammar, not word swaps

    ISL isn't English with hands. It has its own grammar, spatial structure and topic-comment order. spaCy and NLTK reshape each sentence into an ISL gesture sequence.

  • AI synonym mapping

    Words with no sign of their own are mapped through OpenRouter to the closest word the avatar knows.

  • A 3D signer in the browser

    A Three.js avatar plays hand-built animations for the alphabet and a vocabulary of words, live in the page.

Next.js 16React 19Three.jsDjango REST FrameworkspaCy & NLTKAssemblyAIOpenRouterFFmpeg

Live appGitHub

[04]Side quests

  • Statements on the spot

    No prep possible: the problem statements were revealed at the venue. We read, argued, picked one, and started building.

    No spoilers

  • The whole gang

    It wasn't only us. Our friends had made teams too, so the venue was full of people we knew. Amazing fun, all night long. 🌙

    Squad ×∞

  • "Resolved Buhs"

    At 10:48 AM, a little short on sleep, I committed "Resolved Buhs". The bugs were resolved. The typo is still in the git log. 🫠

    Typo ✓

  • Thapar, round two

    Two weeks after Eclipse 6.0, we were back at the same campus for another 24 hours. 🚌

    Repeat visitor

[05]Plot twist

The avatar was supposed to be me. 🧍‍♂️

The mannequin that signed vs. me, stuck in a T-pose all night.
The mannequin that signed vs. me, stuck in a T-pose all night.

Then 😱

Overnight, we tried to swap the mannequin for a 3D model of me, so I'd be the one signing on screen. The model loaded fine. The hands didn't. However hard we tried, my arms stayed straight out in a T-pose and wouldn't come forward to sign. 😩

Now 🧠

Signing is all hands, and hands are all rigging. A different skeleton means every bone name, rotation and animation has to be remapped. The mannequin got the job, and I learned what a T-pose actually is. 🦴

[06]The morning after the all-nighter ☀️

Commits
14
Span
7h 16m
Avg. message
31.4 chars
Shortest
“Integrated”

Lesson from Eclipse learned: this time the repo got pushed. 📦✅ The first commit landed at 5:57 AM, it was "Integrated" by 9:18, and two pull requests, a merge conflict and four README edits later, the last push went in at 1:13 PM.

[07]From the floor

Not just our team. Everyone we came with. 🫶
Not just our team. Everyone we came with. 🫶
Silent hands, after dark
Silent hands, after dark
Six badges, one table
Six badges, one table
"Hello namaskar kaise ho", signed
"Hello namaskar kaise ho", signed

[08]The certificate

Certificate for Hack HelixDelivered ✓

Certificate found. 📬

Hack Helix, Helix 2026, team BUGHACKERS 404. 📜 Our second Thapar certificate in two weeks. Patiala is starting to feel like a second campus. 🏛️

“Sign Setu was the first time a hackathon project made me think about language itself: ISL has its own grammar, not English with hands. And my T-posed avatar is still the best reminder I have that in 3D, the last 10% (the hands) is the hard 90%.”

Next hackathon

Eclipse 6.0

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