Lets Make A Story Measuring MR Child Engagement
This work addresses measuring engagement in child-focused MR systems, but it is incremental as it identifies issues with existing metrics in a pilot study.
The study measured child engagement in a mixed reality storytelling system for grandparents and grandchildren, comparing it to a paper-based version, and found that metrics like time, content, and facial analysis were problematic due to confounding variables, with post-experience interviews being the strongest indicator.
We present the result of a pilot study measuring child engagement with the Lets Make A Story system, a novel mixed reality, MR, collaborative storytelling system designed for grandparents and grandchildren. We compare our MR experience against an equivalent paper story experience. The goal of our pilot was to test the system with actual child users and assess the goodness of using metrics of time, user generated story content and facial expression analysis as metrics of child engagement. We find that multiple confounding variables make these metrics problematic including attribution of engagement time, spontaneous non-story related conversation and having the childs full forward face continuously in view during the story. We present our platform and experiences and our finding that the strongest metric was user comments in the post-experiential interview.