The deaf get a helping hand from new motion-sensing gloves.

Motion-sensing gloves—like the ones from Minority Report—may have finally found a practical use at this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s annual student competition. The first prize went to a group of Ukrainian students who have been engineering a new kind of glove that interprets and verbalizes sign language. Enable Talk, as the creators have named the invention, will allow the deaf and mute to communicate with people who don’t know how to sign. It’s one of several helpful inventions in the past few years to make use of devices that we’ve become familiar with through games—motion sensors, gyroscopes, and gesture recognition.

And it’s only one of many innovative projects that emerged at the competition, which also gave awards to Windows Phone and Xbox games such as MathDash and Ecosia from Drexel University and Ingésup in Bordeaux, respectively.