Children And Body Experience

Game is child's nature as playing an important role in children's development of physical and mental. Early childhood is the period of game, children can learn physical, intellectual, social and emotional through play. With the development of technology, more and more computer and video games occupied children's time. They gradually lost interest in traditional game and choose to sedentary in front of computer or television due to rich game content, play alone, and visual sound effects. Immersed in the PC or video game long time will cause obesity, depression and even allow children in violent tendencies, bringing great negative impact on children's physical condition and social skills. Children now over use some of the senses and overlook the others. The unbalance use of the senses will induce problems such as myopia (over use of eyes), and obesity (lack use of limbs). How to make game-play more direct, natural and maintain the attractiveness of game is the key point of this thesis.This research technologically enhances interaction with traditional games/toys in a novel way. This thesis aims to help children understand and master the usage of their bodies well through integrating augmented sense experience into play by designing tangible user interface and interactive toys. This research describes the concept of 'Sense Augmentation' method: a model based on augmented sense which centers on research of children's behavior and motivation. The goal of this method is to augment sensory impact on children, meanwhile to meet their specific needs.Two of our demonstrations about Tangible User Interface for computer games and interactive toys will be presented in the workshop in the thesis: Bubble Journey and Run Chicken Run, which will achieve to augment and visualize children's primitive senses by capturing them with various analog sensing devices and then integrating with hardware and software embedded in the toy or the game platform.