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a consumer market, but the development of desktop publishing, digital games,
graphical user interfaces, and networked communication expanded the role of the
personal computer in the home by transforming the number crunching machine into
a platform for communication, creativity, and entertainment.
Disney in a Box
illustrates one possible future for home fabrication as a com-
munications and media platform, but it relies on some advances in fabrication that
are still far off, such as the ability of 3D printers to create small functional automata
to perform simple tasks. We need not look so far into the future of this technology,
however, to envision a world in which home fabrication can be used as a meaningful
distribution and syndication platform.
11.5.3
Storytelling Objects
To understand the origins of these scenarios, one must fi rst be familiar with some of
our earlier work in interactive storytelling (Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum
2010
,
2011
;
Tanenbaum et al.
2011
,
2013b
). We created a storytelling system called
The Reading
Glove
that used RFID tagged objects and a custom-built digital glove to tell a story
through tactile interaction. To read the story, one must pick up physical objects,
triggering audio narration that relates the experiences of a British spy in French-
occupied Algiers at the turn of the nineteenth century, who is betrayed by his agency
and forced to fl ee. The project is part of a larger ongoing investigation into Tangible
Ubiquitous Narrative Experiences, or TUNE (Fig.
11.8
).
While there are many wonderful things about working with physical objects for
storytelling—they have tactile and structural affordances, they activate embodied
memory, they create playful opportunities for interaction, etc.—one of the major
drawbacks is that we could not easily disseminate our story in the form that it was
meant to be experienced in. Authors, fi lmmakers, and game designers all are able to
publish and distribute their narratives to broad audiences with relative ease, but
telling stories with objects is materially more diffi cult to communicate to an audi-
ence. It was against this backdrop of personal creative frustration that we envisioned
these scenarios.
Fig. 11.8
Images of the reading glove
