A New Approach to Parallel Interaction through Co-located and Object-oriented Storytelling

Storytelling which is a productive intimate parent-child interaction activity can promote children's emotional management, social competence, and cognitive ability. Joint media engagement (JME) provides digital interaction and becomes a convenient tool for storytelling. However, the interaction between users via JME can be unnatural and unintuitive because of the drawbacks due to the one-sided human-machine interface, continual attention, and tedious work in story planning for characters. To tackle the drawbacks, we propose a parallel interaction storytelling system that uses co-located story enactment experience and object-oriented characters. Our system enables users to enhance parallel interaction in a virtual collaboration environment for storytelling. They can interactively construct stories and manipulate characters in an intuitive manner. An initial testing of the system shows a popular adaptation for parents and their children.