IoT Skullfort: Exploring the Impact of Internet Connected Cosplay
This addresses entertainment enhancement for the cosplay community, but it is incremental as it builds on existing wearable sensing technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing cosplay entertainment by developing an IoT Skullfort costume that allows audience manipulation via a mobile app, reporting results from a focus group with cosplay experts.
In this paper, we explore the potential impact of Internet of Things (IoT) technology may have on the cosplay community. We developed a costume (an IoT Skullfort) and embedded IoT technology to enhance its capabilities and user interactions. Sensing technologies are widely used in many different wearable domains including cosplay scenarios. However, in most of these scenarios, typical interaction pattern is that the costume responds to its environment or the player's behaviour (e.g., colour of lights may get changed when player moves hands). In contrast, our research focuses on exploring scenarios where the audience (third party) get to manipulate the costume behaviour (e.g., the audience get to change the colour of the Skullfort using a mobile application). We believe such an audience (third party) influenced cosplay brings new opportunities for enhanced entertainment. However, it also creates significant challenges. We report the results gathered through a focus group conducted in collaboration with cosplay community experts.