SoundWear: How sound-based wearables can facilitate imaginative heads-up play for children

This research indicates how sound augmentation can promote play experiences in physical, social, and imaginative aspects by designing and examining a novel wearable bracelet with which children can explore, select, sonify, and transfer sounds.

Article | Fall 2020

In the past, children used to spend most of their playtime outdoors. It has long been known that outdoor play helps not only engage children in physical activities, but also foster imaginative thinking as well as essential social skills. In the digital era, children now devote a large portion of their playtime in front of static screens, even in outdoor settings. Children watch television, play computer games, and surf the web on their smartphones while sitting down, with their necks or backs excessively bent. They no longer reap the benefits of outdoor play.

Taking this issue into consideration, a KAIST research team from the Department of Industrial Design, led by Professor Woohun Lee and researcher Jiwoo Hong, devised a novel bracelet-type wearable device called SoundWear that utilizes sound augmentation to encourage outdoor play. Non-speech sound is the crucial digital feature of SoundWear that motivates children to expand their imagination and come up with improvisational outdoor games. With this wearable device, children can select and save a sound out of numerous sound samples (i.e. instrumental and everyday sounds) by placing the device on the additional physical plate, called SoundPalette. After that, children are able to activate the chosen sound through bodily motions such as swinging around their arms. It is also possible to send and receive a sound from one SoundWear device to the other.

The team examined the effect of sound augmentation of SoundWear on outdoor play experiences by conducting a user study in three different experimental conditions: no sound, everyday sound augmentation, and instrumental sound augmentation. Both the quantitative and qualitative results indicated that augmenting playtime with everyday sounds triggered children’s imagination and resulted in distinct play behaviors, whereas instrumental sounds were transparently integrated with existing outdoor games while fully preserving play benefits in physical, social, and imaginative ways. The team also observed that the gestural interaction of SoundWear and the free sound choice on SoundPalette helped children to gain a sense of achievement and ownership toward sound.

 

 

His team envisions that their work can encourage the discussion on using sound augmentation technology for understanding and cultivating creative improvisations, social pretenses, and ownership of digital materials in digitally-augmented play. Furthermore, the verified effect of digital technology on children’s play informs parents and educators to help them make more informed decisions and incorporate the playful and creative usage of new media, such as mobile phones and smart toys, for playing and learning of young children.

This research, “SoundWear: Effect of Non-speech Sound Augmentation on the Outdoor Play Experience of Children”, was presented at DIS 2020 (the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems) which was held virtually in Eindhoven, Netherlands from July 6th to 20th, 2020. The work received the Honorable Mention Award for being in the top 5% out of all the conference paper submissions. Further details about their work can be found at http://wonderlab.kaist.ac.kr For a copy of their paper, please refer to the ACM digital library link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3357236.3395541