A new storytelling genre: combining handicraft elements and storytelling via mixed reality technology

Abstract

Handicraft is a traditional cultural form which can improve children’s hands-on ability and spatial imagination ability. In addition, storytelling is another beneficial activity that can improve children’s language skill and creative power in their growing process. By combining handicraft elements and storytelling via mixed reality technology, this paper presents a new storytelling genre, which supports children and parents learning how to make handicraft and then use them as tangible interaction tools to design, create, tell and share stories, together with gesture interaction. Taking origami as an example, we design and implement a system and conduct a user study. Findings illustrate that our system has good usability and can motivate users’ interest in handicraft and storytelling and even promote parent–child interaction effectively.