Focus your young visitors: -Kids Innovation- Fundamental changes in digital edutainment
Stefan Goebel, Computer Graphics Center, Germany
Sebastian Sauer, ion2s - buero fuer interaktion, Germany
http://www.zgdv.de/distel

Session: Handheld

With regard to the acceptance of human-computer interfaces, immersion represents one of the most important methods for attracting young visitors into museum exhibitions. Exciting and diversely presented content as well as intuitive, natural and human-like interfaces are indispensable to bind users to an interactive system with real and digital parts.

In order to overcome the obstacles to attracting the young, we have taken an interdisciplinary approach to the fields of multimedia, media design, TV/movie or literature, and especially myths, to develop narrative edutainment applications for kids. Similar to Hollywood, production content and dramaturgic scripts are generated by authoring tools and transmitted by multimodal interfaces enhanced by natural conversation forms. These concepts are enhanced by interaction design principles, methods and appliances; such as Kids Innovation or momunaMomuna.

This paper describes both existing technologies and new innovative methods and concepts of interactive digital storytelling and user interaction design to establish immersive edutainment applications and appliances using multimodal user interfaces. These approaches merging into Dino-Hunter as innovative game-oriented mobile edutainment appliances are discussed within the environment of mobile application scenarios for museums and their young visitors.