computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-talking

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-95).School curricula are designed with the expectation that students achieve literacy. They usually support the acquisition of language by encouraging students to learn how to decode information within a sentence. In this thesis it is suggested that literacy skills in children five to seven years of age can be obtained with a broader understanding of language and its representation. Oral storytelling is presented as a way to develop metacognitive skills with a focus on character-based narrative where children must create the perspectives of the characters. The ability to tell stories is common to children from every community and can help them in school performance. Children should therefore be encouraged to express their understanding of character perspectives in oral storytelling. This thesis presents a tangible interface that allows children to practice pre-literacy skills using oral language. It introduces Dolltalk, a system that facilitates children's ability to take narrative perspectives through the mechanism of reporting speech. The toy presented works by asking children to tell stories and by playing back the stories to the child using narrative features. The ability to express the way the characters think and feel in a narrative and what motivates them to act has been shown to be predictive of academic competence among preschool children. A user study was conducted to understand the short-term effect of Dolltalk on children's elaboration of internal states of story characters. The results show that playing with Dolltalk encourages children to introduce their characters in the story and to express the internal states of their characters much more than with the use of a simple tape recorder. The results also show that playing with the current version of Dolltalk or with Dolltalk in tape-recorder mode encourages children to provide spatial and temporal information in their stories much more than they would without hearing any playback of their stories. This thesis presents significant results (p =.04) that indicate the current version of Dolltalk encourages children to express the internal states of their characters.by Catherine N. Vaucelle.S.M

Gesture Object Interfaces to enable a world of multiple projections

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-226).Tangible Media as an area has not explored how the tangible handle is more than a marker or place-holder for digital data. Tangible Media can do more. It has the power to materialize and redefine our conception of space and content during the creative process. It can vary from an abstract token that represents a movie to an anthropomorphic plush that reflects the behavior of a sibling during play. My work begins by extending tangible concepts of representation and token-based interactions into movie editing and play scenarios. Through several design iterations and research studies, I establish tangible technologies to drive visual and oral perspectives along with finalized creative works, all during a child's play and exploration. I define the framework, Gesture Object Interfaces, expanding on the fields of Tangible User Interaction and Gesture Recognition. Gesture is a mechanism that can reinforce or create the anthropomorphism of an object. It can give the object life. A Gesture Object is an object in hand while doing anthropomorphized gestures. Gesture Object Interfaces engender new visual and narrative perspectives as part of automatic film assembly during children's play. I generated a suite of automatic film assembly tools accessible to diverse users. The tools that I designed allow for capture, editing and performing to be completely indistinguishable from one another. Gestures integrated with objects become a coherent interface on top of natural play. I built a distributed, modular camera environment and gesture interaction to control that environment. The goal of these new technologies is to motivate children to take new visual and narrative perspectives. In this dissertation I present four tangible platforms that I created as alternatives to the usual fragmented and sequential capturing, editing and performing of narratives available to users of current storytelling tools. I developed Play it by Eye, Frame it by hand, a new generation of narrative tools that shift the frame of reference from the eye to the hand, from the viewpoint (where the eye is) to the standpoint (where the hand is). In Play it by Eye, Frame it by Hand environments, children discover atypical perspectives through the lens of everyday objects. When using Picture This!, children imagine how an object would appear relative to the viewpoint of the toy. They iterate between trying and correcting in a world of multiple perspectives. The results are entirely new genres of child-created films, where children finally capture the cherished visual idioms of action and drama. I report my design process over the course of four tangible research projects that I evaluate during qualitative observations with over one hundred 4- to 14-year-old users. Based on these research findings, I propose a class of moviemaking tools that transform the way users interpret the world visually, and through storytelling.by Catherine Nicole Vaucelle.Ph.D

Cost-effective wearable sensor to detect EMF

In this paper we present the design of a cost-effective wearable sensor to detect and indicate the strength and other characteristics of the electric field emanating from a laptop display. Our Electromagnetic Field Detector Bracelet can provide an immediate awareness of electric fields radiated from an object used frequently. Our technology thus supports awareness of ambient background emanation beyond human perception. We discuss how detection of such radiation might help to “fingerprint” devices and aid in applications that require determination of indoor location

Dolltalk: A computational toy to enhance children's

This paper presents a novel approach and interface for encouraging children to tell and act out original stories. "Dolltalk" is a toy that simulates speech recognition by capturing the gestures and speech of a child. The toy then plays back a child's pretend-play speech in altered voices representing the characters of the child's story. Dolltalk's tangible interface and ability to retell a child's story may enhance a child's creativity in narrative elaboration

A System to Compose Movies for Cross-Cultural Storytelling: Textable Movie

This paper presents Textable Movie, an open-ended interface that allows anyone to become "video-jockey." In the framework of computational storytelling, Textable Movie promotes the idea of maker controlled media and can be contrasted to automatic presentation systems. Its graphical interface takes text as input and allows users to improvise a movie in real-time based on the content of what they are writing. Media segments are selected according to how the users label their personal audio and video database. As the user types in a story, the media segments appear on the screen, connecting writers to their past experiences and inviting further story-telling. By improvising movie-stories created from their personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone else's video database during the same story, young adults are challenged in their beliefs about other communities

Literacy Learning by Storytelling with a Virtual Peer

In this paper, we present Sam, an embodied conversational storyteller who tells stories interactively with children. Sam was designed to appear as a peer to preschool children, but to tell stories in a developmentally advanced way in order to model narrative skills important for literacy. Literacy learning - learning how to read and write, begins long before children enter school. One of the key skills to reading and writing is the ability to represent thoughts symbolically and share them in language with an audience who does not share the same background. Children learn and practice such important language skills in the informal setting of everyday storytelling with their peers and adults available around them. In particular, storytelling in a context of peer collaboration provides a perfect place where children not only learn language skills important for literacy, but also learn to be critical listeners of others' stories. Preliminary evaluation showed that by interacting with Sam, 5-year-old children's stories became more literate in style as they modeled after Sam's advanced linguistic behaviors. In addition, the children listened to Sam's stories carefully, assisting her and giving suggestions on how to improve them. With Sam, children not only learned new linguistic behaviors that are important for literacy, but also to become critical listeners of other's stories