"Do you think it is going to be the cock?"

Abstract

In this paper we present a lamp prototype that projects controllable shadows to create an ambient backdrop for dialogic reading between parents and their children. The lamp uses four electrochromic displays that allow masking the light and thereby control the shadows that are projected upward onto the ceiling. The displays can switch between general ambience picture and a certain story point in a Smurf book. These displays were used in a reading study with parents reading for their children and a focus group session. The results indicate that the lamp helped in spurring interest and a dialog about the story being read. The used technology proved to be implicitly triggering questions and discussion about the story by creating suspension when switching between the different shadows.

ECPlotter: A Toolkit for Rapid Prototyping of Electrochromic Displays

“…TransPrint [16,31,32] extends this line of work by presenting a fabrication process for screen-printing electrochromic displays, which uses an off-the-shelf hardware setup that can be used in makerspace activities [18] by non-experts to produce their own display designs. Based on this technique also a variety of prototypical applications have been developed in the past, ranging from simple user interfaces [4], notifications [36], hybrid board games [21], over ambient lighting [19,20], wearables [5,15,17], as part of a learning activity [30] or in a soft robot [34]. For our research, we built onto this work and will try to automate the fabrication process of electrochromic displays using printed electronics.…”