iTheater: tangible interactions for storytelling

Project description

iTheater was a preliminary work on an interactive integrated system for story-creation and storytelling, dedicated to young children. Based on the analogy with hand puppets’ theatre, the system aimed to create an interactive environment where children could give life to their imaginary characters by creating, editing and recording computer animations in a simple and exciting way, through the movement and tactile manipulation of traditional hand puppets. The system merged the familiarity of use of physical objects with the engaging richness of expression of sounds, images and animations. The iTheater was conceived as a creative flexible toolkit to create and tell stories, taking advantage of the new opportunities based on the multimedia and interactive technologies. (For further details, please see the INTETAIN-2009 paper.)

My role was to develop the idea into a demonstrable prototype. This prototype has eventually attracted attention of an industrial partner, and leaded to the creation of a commercial i-Theatre system for story creation and storytelling.

Photos

i-Theater demo setup
i-Theater in action
i-Theater in action