ORIGINAL ARTICLE

V. Bayon Æ J. R. Wilson Æ D. Stanton Æ A. Boltman

Mixed reality storytelling environments

Received: 15 March 2003/ Accepted: 5 May 2003� Springer-Verlag London Limited 2003

Abstract The focus of this paper is the collaborativestorytelling environments created as part of a three-yearmulti-disciplinary research project, KidStory. The pro-ject team, from the UK, Sweden and the USA, devel-oped a series of story creation and telling tools andvirtual environments for children aged 5–7 years. Thispaper concerns work with a Nottingham primary schoolto design and develop collaborative storytelling tools,including tangible interfaces devices and reactive spaces,with the aim of integrating these within the schoolcontext. The final set-up allowed children to dynamicallyproduce story content, to create basic narrative struc-tures and to retell their stories in a collaborative andadaptable physical space.

Keywords Children Æ Classroom performance ÆMixed reality Æ Storytelling

Introduction

Storytelling has been a subject of inquiry by intellectualsand academics of many disciplines, including educa-tion, history, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis,

psychology, linguistics, management science, and religion[1]. In the areas of children’s cognitive, social, and emo-tional development, research on storytelling andnarrativeenjoys a long, rich tradition. Storytelling has been shownto support the development of children’s writing, reading,vocabulary, listening skills and other language abilities[2–11]. Narratives are important in the development ofliteracy [12–14].AsVygotskyhas explained [15], ‘‘a sharednarrative becomes a tool for thought.’’

Narratives involve a progression of identifiable ele-ments and structures. Below the age of 5, children arelikely to treat each picture in a storybook in isolation,unable to link pictures into a unified story line [16]. By 5or 6 years of age, children can tell stories that havecomplete plots, with a central character incorporated intoa sequence of events [17]. Older children include morestory grammar components in episodes [18]. In addition,they tend to convey a hierarchically organized series ofevents [16]. In their stories, actions are linked by knowl-edge of goals and causal relationships [19]. By middle tolate elementary school, children attain a sophisticatednarrative structure through elaboration [17].

Storytelling can benefit children in multiple, diverseways which support academic success [20]. Storytellingfacilitates the recall of content/facts [21, 8], assists incomprehension [2, 7], and contributes to listening andconcentration skills [3, 5, 17]. Storytelling offers anopportunity for creative/artistic expression [4, 5, 22].When children engage in storytelling, a variety of socialand emotional benefits can also result, from developinga sense of self and well being [23–26] to nurturing anethical value system [27].

Within the area of children’s technologies, researchersin academia and industry are currently developing toolsthat support children’s storytelling. Much of this tech-nological development rests on the belief that childrenneed many opportunities to express themselves. Childrenalso need to use a variety of tools to accomplish this.Waysfor children to engage in storytelling with an emphasisplaced on multiple, means of expression, from oral towritten to digital, are currently being explored.AsMurray

Virtual Reality (2003) 7: 54–63DOI 10.1007/s10055-003-0109-6

V. Bayon (&)Human Factors Research Group,Virtual Reality Research Applications Team,University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKE-mail: vxb@cs.nott.ac.uk

J. R. WilsonInstitute for Occupational Ergonomics,University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKE -mail: john.wilson@nottingham.ac.uk

D. StantonSchool of Computer Science,University of Nottingham,Jubilee Campus,Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UKE -mail: des@cs.nott.ac.uk

A. BoltmanHCIL/UMIACSUniversity of MarylandA.V. Willams Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA

states [28], we need ‘‘every available form of expressionand all the new ones we can muster to help us understandwho we are and what we are doing here’’ (p. 274).

While we know much about the nature of children’sstorytelling with traditional tools, as illustrated by theabove findings, little is known about the ways in whichnew computer technologies support storytelling. Today,technology is becoming increasingly significant in the lifeof a child. More than ever, teachers and parents arelooking to computer technologies to support learningactivities for their students and children. In the UnitedKingdom, average expenditure on ICT per primaryschool has risen from £3600 in 1998 to £15,400 in 2002,and over 90% of schools have their ICT suites net-worked [29]. Teachers and parents look to technology toprovide children with rich learning experiences.

Perhaps somewhat due to this proliferation of toolsfor this particular population, many educators, partic-ularly in early childhood education, question whethercomputers, in particular, are appropriate for activeyoung children [30, 31]. Fears range from the emotionaland social issues, such as concerns for stunted imagi-nation [32] and social isolation [33] to the physical, suchas worries about musculoskeletal injuries [34].

Given this direction, it is not surprising that computerapplications that support storytelling have received anincreased emphasis in the last few years. In general, themajority of research on technology and storytelling hasconcentrated on interactive games, mystery simulations,and interactive fiction [35]. Interactive games and mys-tery simulations present a story with characters andlocations, and children are able to move around to learnmore about the characters. Interactive fiction presents astory with hypertext, and children can read a new storyeach time by selecting alternate links.

It was in the light of the real interest in finding waysto enhance children’s creativity and collaboration andthe use of computers to do this that led to the setting upof the parent project, KIDSTORY, of which the work inthis paper was a part. The particular technological focuswas virtual environments and distributed systems, andthe human factors focus was on design partnering andevaluation in context.

The paper presents a brief overview of the KidStoryproject. The evolution of storytelling tools are thendiscussed with emphasis on how the children used thesetools and how they were designed for classroom use.

Background – the KIDSTORY project

KidStory was funded by the EU Experimental SchoolsEnvironments Theme within the I3 programme. Thiswas a multi-partner, multi-country and inter-disciplinaryproject, with partners at University of Nottingham,KTH and SICS in Stockholm and the University ofMaryland in the USA. The underlying theme of theproject was to provide computer support for childrenaged 5 years and 7 years in Swedish and UK schools, to

allow them to create, tell, re-tell and archive stories. Themajor supporting theme was that development was to becarried out through what was variously known as aphilosophy of participatory design, collaborative designor design partnering. The project ran for three years and,broadly, Year 1 was devoted to shoulder-to-shouldercollaboration (pairs of children), Year 2 to allowinglarger groups to control an experience of a story, andYear 3 to the development of distributed tools to movetowards a ‘‘storytelling room’’.

Year 1 technology was built on the use of KidPad,originally developed at University of Maryland [36]. Thechildren are enabled to each use a mouse and varioustools on the screen to create and draw objects and to linkthem together to create stories. Facilities of zooming andembedded links allowed an experience akin to that of avirtual environment, whereby children could walk up apath through the front door of a house they created andinto rooms with various furniture and other items.Children would work together to create a story and thenre-tell it to the class.

The next generation of development [37] was to allowmultiple children to collaboratively ‘‘walk through’’ andre-tell a story. In this work a group of children wouldcreate a story using KidPad and, with the story projectedon a large screen, control viewpoint and interaction invarious ways. For instance, a ‘‘magic carpet’’ with triggerswitches around it allowed movement of the viewpoint infour directions if the children all stood together in one partof the carpet. Another technique was to use video captureof the children all completing one action, for instanceholding a card above their head for the viewpoint to go upand crouching down for the viewpoint to go down.Sounds were added during this year to match the actionson the screen, and improvements were made to the waythat stories were constructed and retold.

In the third year the move was towards a more dis-tributed set of tools and to create an electronic room,matching perhaps the physical spaces with multipleprops (clothing, objects) that children traditionally useto tell stories. A variety of devices such as PDAs, scan-ners, bar codes or tags were used, as well as elements ofthe previous set up such as the large screen display andthe magic carpet. Multi-modal integration was enabled,allowing children to draw elements of stories on thePDAs and to scan them into the large screen version, orscan previously hand-drawn objects or scenes [38].Multiple interaction was still allowed, with more thanone child able to interact with the story at any one time.

Within this paper we concentrate on the develop-ments primarily of the final two years of developmentwithin the UK school.

Beyond the desktop storytelling

For more than 15 years, the research community hasbeen exploring interactive computer systems, basedmainly on interactive narratives as a very appealing

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medium for the participants. In Immersive Environments[39] Druin demonstrated the concept of physical inter-action with computer systems. In Kidsroom, video grouptracking techniques were used to control and move for-ward the narrative flow of a story [40]. Swamped! used anovel toy or ‘sympathetic’ interface to control the inter-actions of a virtual character within a virtual storyenvironment [41]. In StoryRooms, children had thechance to design and create their own interactive envi-ronment [42]. Physical programming takes the environ-ment to the next authoring level by allowing children tobuild their own physical interactive environment [43].One important characteristic of these environments wasthat they gave the user more freedom to move in thespace around the system. In these types of environments,children are more open to explore, experience and movethan adults [40]. A critical part of a child’s early cognitivedevelopment is in negotiating the physical world. Thesedifferent applications presented the participants (childrenand adults) with a diverse number of ways of interactingwith computer systems that did not involve the use ofGraphical User Interfaces (GUIs), keyboard or mousebased interfaces. One important characteristic of theseenvironments was that they gave the user more freedomto move in the space around the system.

However, these technologies are not to be found inthe UK classroom. The primary classroom is still at thestage of pairs of children collaborating at a desktopcomputer either in the corner of a classroom or within acomputer suite. While our aim within the project was todevelop authoring storytelling environments, we neededto engage the children and teachers in designing thistechnology with us in order for it to fit within, and moreimportantly, be used within, the classroom. As childrenoften work in pairs or in groups using the computer theyhave to deal with the limitations of desktop technology,such as the lack of shared input devices. Traditionaldesktop computers do not facilitate two or more usersinteracting simultaneously and equally with the softwareand hardware [44]. For example, Light and Glachan’sstudy found that boys are more likely to take control ofthe mouse when access was limited [45].

However, whereas a standard PC would physicallylimit the task to a fixed physical location, ubiquitoustechnologies allow users to be mobile and to simulta-neously access information from the digital and the realworld. This paper illustrates how work carried outduring the three years developing collaborative tech-nologies and environments for the classroom enabledgroups of children to create and retell stories within theclassroom context.

Collaborative storytelling environments

Phase one

The software used was KidPad [46] a desktop collabo-rative drawing application based on the novel concept of

Zooming User Interface (ZUI), ‘Local Tools’ andMultiple Input Devices metaphors [36, 47]. KidPad al-lows childen to form ‘‘non linear’’ narrative structuresvia zooming/navigation. A recent study reported thatKidPad offered children benefits in elaboration and re-call by means of the production of a more complex storystructure [48].

Phase two

During the project we extended KidPad to support lar-ger groups of children in a storytelling environment.Working with an entire class, we observed how story-telling was traditionally carried out in the classroom andaimed to support this with technology. The desktoptechnology, while extended to allow multiple input de-vices, was limited in enabling children to share theirstories with an audience, to work in larger groups and toinvolve the whole class. Using design ideas from thechildren we developed a number of interfaces to KidPadto support retelling of stories to audiences.

An example of one of these interfaces is the MagicCarpet which was composed of 12 floor sensors organ-ised in four rows that could be configured into differentshapes but was primarily used as a square. The carpetwas placed in front of a large screen display of KidPad.The Magic Carpet enabled multiple children to movearound a story by jumping on the sensors. If they movedforwards they would move forwards within the envi-ronment. There were also collaborative effects where ifone child stood forward and another to the left, theirviewpoint on screen would move diagonally left.

Additionally, a barcode interface allowed children tomark the different scenes and print them out togetherwith a barcode. Scanning the barcode would result inKidPad zooming or navigating back to the markedscene. The magic carpet and the barcode interfaces weredesigned to increase the visibility of navigation whileretelling stories in projected KidPad to an audience (seeFig. 1).

An example case of this technology in use was withthe creation of the story of the ‘The Lighthouse KeepersLunch.’ This was a book that was being used as part ofliteracy hour within the classroom. Children drew theirversion of the story in Kidpad. They then could use themagic carpet and barcodes to retell their story to eachother and an audience. During the retelling childrencould advance the story in a sequence (as it was createdwith KidPad links in the first place), or go back toprevious scenes, or jump to any scene using the bar-codes, while more sequential navigation could be per-formed with the magic carpet. The storytelling sessionsbenefited from this non-linear structured as the childrenmust choose the correct scene but also had the oppor-tunity to review previous scenes. With the barcodes onechild could control KidPad while the rest could collab-oratively retell the story facing the audience. Using thisset-up enabled children to animate the story, discuss the

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elements of the story and narrate it to others. The use oftechnology in this way complemented traditional media(i.e. a book they were working on as part of literacyhour) as curriculum activity and provided a fun collec-tive physical activity.

These technologies were subsequently used for the‘Here/There’ performance. This was a live event stagedby the artist Hayley Newman involving children fromthe school at the ‘Now Arts 2000’ Festival in Notting-ham. The performance consisted of a series of 12 inter-weaved stories with 10 scenes each displayed on twoscreens that was totally controlled with barcode labelsattached to objects, clothes and children (see Fig. 2).

There were a total number of 480 media elements,with 240 unique graphics and 240 sounds, with eachscene consisting of an image and a sound. All thesounds, graphics, images and stories were tagged withbarcodes, having a total of 492 barcodes.

The mixture of the graphics and the sounds triggeredby barcodes created a rich visual and aural experiencefor the attending audience.

During the creation of the performance, a specialversion of KidPad was developed. This version ofKidPad made use of an extra module that loadedstories associated to a barcode, similar to the onedeveloped earlier. When a story barcode was scanned,KidPad pre-loaded in memory all the media thatwas associated with that story. The pre-loading wasdone in order to minimize the time lag that KidPadintroduced when replaying/loading sounds andgraphics.

The whole system relied on barcodes to operate,providing the artist with an easy and convenient way tointeract by ‘pointing and scanning’ with the set-up. Thebarcode and the barcode readers were part of the per-formance itself.

The set-up demonstrated the versatility of barcodesas a medium for tagging, visually identifying and trig-gering events that worked for the artist, the audienceand the children during the performance.

Fig. 1 Magic carpet and barcode interfaces in KidPad

Fig. 2 ‘Here/There’ performance in Nottingham, 2000

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Phase three

In phase three of the project we aimed to integrate toolsthat we have developed into phase two to produce astorytelling environment for creation as well as retelling.We aimed to integrate traditional media with technologyso that technology was part of the story and not just aplaceholder for the digital media. By doing this we ob-served that the physical configuration of the technologychanged the way children created and retold stories.

We experimented with a number of configurations toproduce an effective storytelling environment. Forexample, in one configuration KidPad was projected onthe floor, and the magic carpet was situated around it.With this new layout, children sat around the screen andused the sensors for navigating left/right up and down(see Fig. 3).

In this context, the projection and the magic carpetafforded different possibilities, such as sitting around thedisplay and including physical props as part of thecontent of the story. Figure 3 shows a group of childrencreating a story by drawing a house and road, andplaying with a physical truck made of cardboard. Thechildren could make the truck ‘move’ by drawing a roadon the KidPad canvas and moving it.

In the technology considered here so far, Kidpad wasused for the creation of story content while the magiccarpet and barcodes were used to enable retelling.Additionally the stories were primarily based on draw-ings with some text.

In Fig. 4 we illustrate the typical classroom story-telling scenarios with KidPad and tools. In scenario one(top left corner), the teacher is running an everydayclass. This scenario is very common as the teacher ob-serves children working on tasks previously instructed.In scenario two (top right hand corner) the teacher leadsstory creation in KidPad. This scenario usually occurredbefore deploying the magic carpet as the main mean ofcreation content for the stories.

Scenario 3 (bottom left) shows two children workingdetached from the main activity performed by the rest ofthe classroom. Sometimes, the teacher instructed one ormore children to work with KidPad, while the rest of theclass carried on with other work. In this context childrenused other computer and other software, such as KidPix.The picture shows a classroom assistant observing thechildren. Scenario 4 (bottom right) illustrates the magiccarpet set-up deployed in the school’s hall during aretelling session.

In the final phase of the project we looked at thesescenarios and through an iterative design process wedeveloped tools to enable children to create and retelltheir stories within one collaborative environment. For afull review of the technical issues that needed to be takeninto account when developing interactive environmentsfor the classroom, see Bayon et al. [38].

Rather than drawing at a desktop computer childrencould now either draw their pictures as usual and thenscan them into KidPad automatically or use a PersonalDigital Assistant (PDA) which allowed them to beamtheir images directly to KidPad. A web camera wasadded to the environment so that children could takeinstant images which were imported directly to KidPad,allowing them to use pictures of their environment intheir stories. A sound recording module enabled childrento record sounds, print them out on a barcode and addthem to the stories [49].

Previously with KidPad children created content bydrawing and creating the structure. With the newcomponents it was still possible to print out the dif-ferent scenes with an attached barcode. The soundrecording added a new dimension to the stories as theycould easily associate sounds to the scenes. When asound was recorded, a barcode label automaticallyprinted out. The label could be pasted anywhere(Fig. 5).

When creating a story the children planned a narra-tive that held a shared history for them. The use ofcharacters from another storybook that was being usedas part of literacy hour created a frame for the children

Fig. 3 Phase three layout in KidPad

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to work collaboratively to create a story and placed thiswork within their on-going class work.

Children used all the components of the tangible set-up for the creation of a story during three sessions. Thedifferent interaction modalities and media types allowedchildren to create and combine sounds, images anddrawings in their stories collaboratively.

The use of barcode labels provided a flexible way totag sounds and images, create links within KidPad, re-trieve content for the retelling of the stories and forarchiving. All the content in KidPad could be linked tobarcodes. In this way, children created a physical copyof all the story content that was both tangible andinteractive.

A drawing was scanned and a link was created inKidPad (see Fig. 6). A printout of the link with a bar-code and the representation of the viewpoint wereprinted immediately after a link was created. The bar-code on the right represents a sound associated with thedrawing, in this case a character of the story. The bar-codes representing sounds were physically and visuallydifferent than the ones representing links.

The stories were composed with graphics and sounds,and were structured physically with the barcodes.Although the barcodes held a physical structure that

represented the order in they were created, they could beaccessed arbitrarily in any order, providing a way toimprovise during the telling of the stories.

Figure 7 describes a possible physical arrangement ofthe structure of the story. The main page represents athumbnail view of the whole content of the story, wherethe smaller pieces of paper represent the different char-acters that children created. Some of these charactershad embedded sound tags. Children pasted the barcodelabels to the characters so they could remember whichsound belonged to which character.

To know in which order the characters were cre-ated, children had to look at the number on the bar-code. All the content was numbered from 000 toNNN, where the first link created had the number 000,and then 001, 002, 003, etc. During the sessions, chil-dren often added information on the printouts bywriting in them in order to provide extra cues for there-telling exercises.

Children and teachers could archive the story bysimply keeping the stories in a folder. The thumbnailview of the story allowed an easy direct access to thestory. The images and sounds were automatically loadedby scanning the barcode.

An evaluation of a group of children using this set-uphighlighted how children collaborated and made use ofthe set-up given the asynchronous nature of the system.As they became more confident with the technology

Fig. 4 Typical classroom storytelling scenarios with KidPad

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they combined more physical everyday artefacts intotheir stories. For example, one girl brought in her flutein order to record the sound of the seagulls. All of thechildren contributed parts of the story. However whilethey collaborated well around the technology theyfound it difficult to plan the story structure. With thistechnology, as within the classroom, the teacher isneeded to frame the activity in order to encourage thechildren to work together and aid in structuring theirwork.

Interesting aspects of this set-up for storytelling inthe classroom were that the children could enhancetheir stories with sounds as they could easily create thesounds and replay them. The children found it easier todraw with pen and paper as they had better controlwith them that with the mouse. The set-up enabledmultiple children to create a story together as any childcould create content. The same story was stored intwo different mediums digital or physical. The resultingaugmented paper-based stories that were the outcomeof the story creation could be used after the storycreation session as a part of ongoing classroomactivities.

Conclusions

Literacy hour in the UK curriculum brings with it anexclusive attention to print materials. However, childrenin their everyday environments are making meaning outof all types of objects, drawings and other visual andaudio media. Schools need to engage children’s experi-ences, which are increasingly involving technology use,to foster critical reflection.

The Kidstory project can be viewed in a number ofdifferent ways. It certainly involves development of newIT tools to use collaboratively in the classroom, andwhen tool development was seen as central then thisdrove new interface developments, provided the focuswithin which to refine the design partner methodologyand was the mechanism by which educational gains wereachieved and evaluated. A strong element also is the use,extension and further development of a design partner-ing methodology, as a means both to generate anditeratively produce new technology designs, and also as aprocess through which the children and teachers as wellas the researchers learn. When the building of designpartnerships was central, then this provided an im-proved design process (for which transfer could be seen

Fig. 5 Sound recording module

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into many domains), was the means of technologyinfusion, and was the process to be evaluated. The thirdfocus for the project has been on storytelling, furtherdivided into storytelling abilities, general collaborationgains and collaborative storytelling. In the view of col-laborative storytelling as central, then this meant that itdrove design of systems to promote and support col-laborative creativity, was the focus (rather than the tool)for the design partner methodology refinement and

design partnership support, and helped to generatemeasures of developmental and educational gains.

Within the project we have been concerned with anumber of aspects of the story production and tellingprocess. At different times we have worked with thechildren as they identified the bases for stories (nomi-nating appropriate media as well as characters and set-tings), and then created these stories either in pairs or inlarger groups. Subsequently we have worked with thechildren as they have told these stories and then re-toldthem, reflecting adaptations to various elements. Finallywe have worked with the children to help the recording

Fig. 6 Link in KidPad

Fig. 7 Possible physical arrangement of the structure of the story

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and archiving of the stories which have been produced.Therefore, stories have played a number of differentroles within the Kidstory project. The major technicalobjective is to develop computer technologies which al-low children, collaboratively, to create, construct, telland re-tell stories, and in this sense we have needed tounderstand how to evaluate improvements in stories andstorytelling capabilities. By extension, for some of thechildren who we have tracked through two or threeyears of the project, we are also looking for evidence ofimprovement in their creativity and related develop-mental attributes, which we can ascribe (to an extent) tothis work in storytelling. As well as creativity and sto-rytelling being valuable outcomes in their own right, weare also looking for the work on storytelling to provideother learning gains for the children, in areas such asliteracy. The collaborative methodology has been usedto develop technologies which themselves can be used todevelop and tell better stories. However, viewing thisanother way, we have carefully set up the process fordeveloping and telling stories so as to support the col-laborative design process itself. Strongly related to this,the very use of stories with the children as a focus forusing the technology has helped to motivate them andmaintain their interest in being design partners fortechnical development.

One of the most interesting and exciting outcomes ofKidStory is the embedding of our tools in classroompractice. Even when the researchers have not beenpresent, some teachers have continued to use tools intheir literacy lessons. Thus, the evaluation of how Kid-Story has changed children’s storytelling capabilities andtheir stories can continue once the project has ended.There is evidence that KidStory tools support children inelaboration of existing stories, with more complexstructure and greater understanding of initiating eventsand of goals. The contributions that the children havemade in the collaborative design process, their confi-dence and the support they were given by the variousstory telling objects and tangible devices we producedallowed them to perform an improvised story in front ofan audience.

Classroom observations and analysis of transcriptsfrom children’s discussions demonstrate their capabilityto produce complex non-linear stories using KidPadwith two mice. Initial observations indicate the potentialof KidPad with two mice for story creation and of atangible set-up (e.g. magic carpet, video tracking,printers, barcode readers, projector) for performanceand re-telling.

Stories produced using the KidStory tools may be‘archived’ in paper print outs, be available for retellingand elaboration on the same tools or on other set-upsfrom the project, or may exist in the collective memo-ries of class and teachers, to be reconstructed and re-told on the same or different technology set-up atanother time.

A large number of human factors issues emergedduring the work. One of the main ones was how to carry

out the, often glibly proposed, approach of collaborativedesign for the type of virtual environment tools beingdeveloped in this particular setting. The requirements ofthe school, its curriculum, timetable, time resources andphysical space, and the children’s age groups, meant itwas extraordinarily difficult for systems to be re-con-figured as required by the participants (children andteachers) in anything approaching a reasonable time-scale. Nonetheless, by building up a very close rela-tionship over a long period of time, through theenthusiasm of the teachers for the work and by usingadditional development sessions with the children in theUniversity laboratories, we can genuinely say that mostof the development ideas which emerged were generatedby, or at least with, the children. Likewise, the continualformative testing on iterative generations of technologyalso involved the children at all stages, and enabled moreuseful, useable and robust technical systems to emergethan might otherwise have been the case.

Amongst the human factors issues and questions leftopen, to do with the use of the tools created, are:

� How can we best understand a joint physical andconceptual collaboration amongst several users?

� How can we best enable collaborative control ofviewpoint and manipulation of objects?

� What were different requirements to give action-re-sponse mapping when groups of children were col-laboratively changing the viewpoint, and particularlywere different control device and actions requiredwhen the outcome was a genuine movement of theviewpoint (i.e. a tilt or pan) to when the action merelymoved or slid the scene across the display screen (iescrolling)?

� How can we evaluate the real outcomes that wewanted, shared by several other virtual environmentapplications, of creativity, design quality and collab-oration?

� What human factors advice can be offered for inter-faces to control virtual environments or to enhanceparticipation in them by using tangible and personaldevices?

Acknowledgements This work has been conducted as part of theEU Esprit 29310 KidStory project. The authors acknowledgesupport from all partners (SICS/Maryland/KTH). Thanks also tothe teachers and children at the primary school in Nottingham fortheir collaboration in this work. To download KidPad see http://www.kidpad.org.

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