Narratron is an interactive projector that augments hand shadow puppetry with AI-generated storytelling. Designed for all ages, this product transforms traditional physical shadow plays into a truly immersive and intelligent phygital storytelling experience.
Publication
Media Features
CAN: Narratron - Shadow play with a storytelling AI
Design Milk: A Hand-Cranked Artificial Intelligence Powered Storytelling Machine
AI Puts Creative Storytelling in Your Hands
TechAcute: Narratron: The Shadow-Based Interactive Projector
Context
The history of hand shadow play is nearly untraceable which was prevalently practiced long before the existence of Greek shadow show Karagiozis or Chinese shadow puppetry Pi Ying Xi. It is a prelinguistic and transcultural form of storytelling that entertains, educates, and instills moral values in the younger generation; it is also a stimuli of creative production, by mimicking the things we see, and by telling the stories we relate. Narratron, in that sense, has deeply embedded AI into this intelligent collective effort of hands, eyes, and brains as a true “fairytale copilot”. Its nature of multimodality that combines visual, auditory, tactile, and textual I/O, supported by the collaboration of LLM, image classifier, speech synthesizer and diffusion models, demonstrates how seamlessly we are able to make bodily interactions with AI. Through bridging the digital and the physical, we are now bridging the ancient and the future.
