We are making a children’s fabric book with soft sensors to create an interactive playful experience. It is an interactive storytelling experience augmented by using sensor inputs and outputs to create different story outcomes. By adding digital interactive elements to the fabric book, we hope to explore innovative ways of letting young children to learn and practice skills through tactile experiences with the help of soft electronics. The interaction process starts as the child touching and interacting with the soft fabric sensors, sensors picking up the inputs and processing events for outputs, and the outputs will guide the child to proceed with the storyline.
Our project is a new kind of interactive book where the outcome of the story is determined by the child’s choice with the purpose of educating the kids how to eat healthier. Just as the child starts to read the book, he/she is given a set of raw food(ex. vegetables, chicken, eggs, fruit, milk). Each page of the book will accept a subset of raw food, and depending on the choice(sensed by sensors) the kid makes, the book will return a finished product in return(ex. grilled chicken v.s. fried chicken, fruit platter v.s. ice-cream). At the end of the book, the child places the returned food into a ‘mouth’. The food then goes through a digestive process, where different tactile/visual/auditory outputs will be given based on the “good”/”bad” of the returned food.
For our proof-of-concept experiment, we will experiment with how the sensors can contribute to the storyline of converting raw ingredients into cooked food. We will try to pair the sensors with specific food making processes and integrate the sensors into their individual pages. We will ignore the appearances of the food pieces for now, and focus on the modes of interaction and types of feedback first.
Our bill of material remains very much the same as what we had：
| Items | Quantities | Unit Price | Total Cost by Items | Notes / Store Locations |
| Adafruit Flora | 1 | 50.99 | 50.99 | link |
| Conductive thread | (included in the Flora budget pack) | |||
| Resistive thread | Had trouble finding where to buy | |||
| Resistive yarn | Had trouble finding where to buy | |||
| Conductive fabric | 1 | 8.99 | 8.99 | link (20 cm) |
| x6-Inch by 1/16 (Pack of 3) Neoprene | 1 | 10.42 | 10.42 | link |
| Colored yarns | 1 | 2.97 | 2.97 | link |
| Colored threads/floss | 1 | 5.29 | 5.29 | link |
| Assorted Color Felt Pack | 1 | 10.88 | 10.88 | link |
We found the technical papers for the tutorials Garth shared in class:
Perner-Wilson, Hannah, and Leah Buechley. “Handcrafting textile mice.” In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 434-435. 2010.
Perner-Wilson, Hannah, Leah Buechley, and Mika Satomi. “Handcrafting textile interfaces from a kit-of-no-parts.” In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, pp. 61-68. 2010.