A Mixed-Reality System to Promote Child Engagement in Remote Intergenerational Storytelling

We present a mixed reality (MR) storytelling system designed specifically for multi-generational collaboration with child engagement as a key focus. Our "Let’s Make a Story" system comprises a two-sided experience that brings together a remote adult and child to tell a story collaboratively. The child has a mixed reality phone-based application with an augmented manipulative that controls the story’s main character. The remote adult participates through a web-based interface. The adult reads the story to the child and helps the child play the story game by providing them with items they need to clear the scenes.In this paper, we detail the implementation of our system and the results of a user study. Eight remote adult-child pairs experienced both the MR and a traditional paper-based storytelling system. To measure engagement, we used questionnaire analysis, engagement time with the story activity, and the word count of the child’s description of how the story should end. We found that children uniformly preferred the MR system, spent more time engaged with the MR system, and used more words to describe how the story should end incorporating details from the game.