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Storytelling is a critical step in the cognitive development of children. Particularly, this requires children to mentally project into the story context and to identify with the thoughts of the characters in their stories. We propose to support free imagination in creative storytelling through an enactment- based approach that allows children to embody an avatar and perform as the story character. We designed our story creation interface with two modes of avatar: the story-relevant avatar and the self-avatar, to investigate the effects of avatar design on the quality of children’s creative products. In our study with 20 child participants, the results indicate that self-avatars can create a stronger sense of identification and embodied presence, while story-relevant avatars can provide a scaffold for mental projection.
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Understanding Avatar Identification through Visual Similarity for Richer Story Creation
This paper explores avatar identification in creative story- telling applications where users create their own story and environment. We present a study that investigated the effects of avatar facial similarity to the user on the quality of the story product they create. The children told a story using a digital puppet-based storytelling system by inter- acting with a physical puppet box that was augmented with a real-time video feed of the puppet enactment. We used a facial morphing technique to manipulate avatar facial similarity to the user. The resulting morphed image was applied to each participants puppet character, thus creating a custom avatar for each child to use in story creation. We hypothesized that the more familiar avatars appeared to participants, the stronger the sense of character identification would be, resulting in higher story quality. The proposed rationale is that visual familiarity may lead participants to draw richer story details from their past real-life experiences. Qualitative analysis of the stories supported our hypothesis. Our results contribute to avatar design in children's creative storytelling applications.
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- PAR ID:
- 10101237
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Communications in computer and information science
- ISSN:
- 1865-0929
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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