Kids in Fairytales: Experiential and Interactive Storytelling in Children's Libraries

Seokbin Kang, Youngwoon Lee, Suwoong Lee

Abstract: Mixed Reality (MR) has the potential to improve the quality of users' experience by immersing users in the virtual world, but the limitations of computer vision and 3D graphics techniques have made it difficult to bring up practical applications. In this paper we present a mixed reality application that combines a mixed reality experience and storytelling to motivate young children to engage more in reading. We describe system design from physical space to software implementation and share our findings from 4 years of deployment. Since the first prototype was deployed at a national children's library headquartered in Korea, the accumulated number of young visitors reached 15000 and 20 additional children's libraries have installed the system. Our results demonstrate that mixed reality applications create a pleasant and engaging user experience for young children combined with storytelling.