Research Supervisors
Freedom Baird, Arjan Schutte
Jim Davis, Stephan Intille, et. al.
Designed in the spirit of Peter Pan, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Where the Wild Things Are, the Kidsroom was a fully-automated, interactive narrative playspace for children. Using images, lighting, sound, and computer vision action recognition technology, a child's bedroom was transformed into an unusual world for fantasy play.
Objects in the room became characters in an adventure, and the room itself actively participated in the story, guiding and reacting to the children's choices and actions. Through voice, sound, and image the KidsRoom entertained and provoked the mind of the child.
First, the Kidsroom was a rich environment for exploring the design of interactive spaces that sense their environment using automatic vision-based action recognition.
Second, coupling visual perception to the narrative of a children's story permitted the development of context-sensitive computer vision techniques.
Finally, the Kidsroom served as a testbed for developing infrastructure for more sophisticated interactive spaces to be designed in the future.
The Kidsroom used three video cameras and six fast computers. The children's positions and actions were tracked and recognized automatically by computer and used as input for the narration control system. Computer vision techniques were tightly coupled to the narrative, exploiting the context of the story in determining both what needed to be seen and how to see it.
Story and Script
Vision Systems and Narrative Control
Intille S; Baird F; Schütte A; et. al. (1996).
The Kidsroom: A Perceptually-Based Interactive and Immersive Story Environment
IC Technical Report.