INSTRUCTIONS
PROPOSAL
GDrive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-79RLVLdkeoZCCYlKiRselR6leFM4Ilv?usp=drive_link
Storybook Alive: Task 2 - Project Proposal Presentation Slides by Iman Mikudim and Zara Sophia
1. Project Title
Storybook Alive: Bringing Pages to Life with Augmented Reality
2. Introduction / Project Overview
Storybook Alive is a mobile AR experience that brings printed storybooks to life through animated scenes, narration, and sound effects. Children scan illustrations with a smartphone or tablet to see characters and environments animate directly on the page.
This project blends traditional reading with digital interaction to encourage early literacy and emotional engagement. Designed for home or classroom use, the experience is interactive, sensory-rich, and crafted to evoke curiosity, joy, and empathy. A quiz at the end of each story reinforces comprehension and reflection on the story’s moral.
- Core Theme: Enhancing childhood reading through immersive storytelling
- Experience Type: Screen-based AR using printed books and mobile devices
- Tone & Feel: Interactive, imaginative, emotionally engaging]
3. Objective / Purpose
The project aims to make reading more engaging and enjoyable for children aged 4–8, encouraging them to develop a reading habit. It addresses the challenge of low attention spans in early readers and the gap between digital entertainment and traditional learning.
Problems Addressed:
- Reading can feel passive and unexciting for modern children.
- Children may struggle with emotional comprehension and engagement in static books.
- Desired Impact:
- Improve literacy, narrative understanding, and emotional intelligence.
- Create joyful and memorable reading experiences.
4. Target Audience
Primary Audience: Children aged 4–8 (kindergarten and early primary school)
User Persona Example:
- Name: Aidan
- Age: 6
- Interests: Cartoons, storytelling, animals
- Needs: Fun, visual learning, interactive engagement
- Tech access: Parents' smartphone/tablet at home
5. Analysis of Current Experience
Currently, children's reading experiences are largely centered on static books or passive e-book narration. These formats depend heavily on either adult involvement or the child’s pre-existing interest in reading, offering limited sensory engagement or interactivity. While such traditional methods have enduring value, they also present limitations that hinder deeper narrative comprehension and emotional development in early readers.
Limitations of the Current Experience
- Lack of Visual and Interactive Stimulation: Most children's books are visually rich but non-dynamic. While illustrations help scaffold comprehension, the lack of movement, animation, or sensory cues can reduce engagement, especially for young readers who are accustomed to interactive digital content.
- Passive Listening vs. Active Participation: E-books and audiobooks often reduce the reading experience to passive consumption. Children may listen without actively engaging with the narrative structure, characters, or themes, leading to superficial retention.
- Limited Emotional and Moral Engagement Without Guidance: Without facial expressions, tone shifts, or kinetic cues, static illustrations can struggle to convey emotional depth or moral nuance. In the absence of adult interpretation, the child may miss key affective elements of the story.
These limitations suggest that while traditional storybooks lay foundational literacy skills, they often fall short in promoting emotional intelligence, moral reflection, and engagement through multisensory learning.
User Experience Considerations
In many cases, young readers (ages 4–8) rely on parental facilitation to guide them through the reading experience—clarifying vocabulary, emphasizing emotional moments, or helping interpret story morals. This dependence creates variability in engagement based on the adult’s availability, literacy level, and enthusiasm.
Without interactive features, a child's journey through a story typically follows this arc:
- Initial interest drawn from visuals or cover
- Narrative progression guided by text or voice
- Conclusion with no active reinforcement or feedback
This results in a relatively flat learning curve, where comprehension and retention depend on the child’s intrinsic motivation or adult prompting. For digital-native children accustomed to interactivity, this format can feel outdated or unstimulating.
Educational Implications
From a pedagogical perspective, this passivity runs counter to developmental learning models such as those proposed by Vygotsky and Piaget, which emphasize learning through active engagement, play, and social interaction. Children in this age group benefit most from multimodal learning environments—those that combine visual, auditory, and kinesthetic inputs to reinforce comprehension and emotional learning.
Additionally, in the age of ubiquitous technology, there is a growing digital divide between entertainment and education. Children are drawn to screens, yet many educational tools lack the interactivity of the entertainment media they consume. Static reading materials rarely meet the interactivity threshold modern learners subconsciously expect.
Why Storybook Alive is Needed
Storybook Alive responds directly to these issues by introducing augmented reality (AR) as an educational and emotional scaffold. Unlike many AR storybooks that treat interactivity as an aesthetic feature, Storybook Alive designs AR as a narrative tool, offering:
- Real-time interaction (e.g., tapping the egg to make it wiggle)
- Context-sensitive animations that mirror the story’s emotional beats
- Sound and narration layers to enhance immersion
- Quizzes and reflections that deepen understanding and retention
By enabling children to trigger, anticipate, and influence story events, Storybook Alive transforms reading from a passive act into an exploratory journey—bridging the gap between traditional literacy and digital fluency. This approach also helps address the emotional gap often found in conventional children’s books, enabling children to connect with characters on a deeper level through expressive animation and audio cues.
6. Comparative Analysis
To contextualize Storybook Alive, we examined two existing AR-enhanced children’s storybooks—My Favourite Days and All The Magic In Your Hands. Each presents a unique integration of AR in storytelling, reflecting different pedagogical goals and engagement strategies. Our comparative analysis focuses on key aspects relevant to educational design and user experience.
Theme & Narrative Focus
Storybook Alive centers on growth and transformation, designed to emotionally engage children through stories that evolve as the reader interacts.
My Favourite Days explores future technology and family bonding, taking readers on a reflective and aspirational journey through Singapore with a grandparent figure.
All The Magic In Your Hands adopts a recycling and sustainability theme, focusing on actionable behavior change through hands-on, item-based storytelling.
Storytelling Style
Storybook Alive follows a simple, linear, and rhythmic style suitable for early readers, allowing consistent pacing and emotional anchoring.
My Favourite Days takes a reflective, educational journey, aiming to spark curiosity about technology and urban environments.
All The Magic In Your Hands is activity-centric and educational, turning each page into a prompt for real-world creative tasks using recyclable materials.
Visual & Interactive Features
Storybook Alive employs flat, vector-style illustrations with tap-to-animate features, enhancing immersion while maintaining simplicity.
My Favourite Days also uses flat vector visuals, with light AR overlays and transitions to guide the reader visually through scenes.
All The Magic In Your Hands offers 3D model animations, requiring physical interaction and AR scanning for item-based exploration and learning.
AR Experience & Engagement
Storybook Alive delivers story-driven animations and feedback, integrating AR as a narrative tool rather than an add-on.
My Favourite Days utilizes informative overlays and transitions, enhancing the story without diverting from its linear structure.
All The Magic In Your Hands leverages item-triggered animations, providing tactile and visual reinforcement of its recycling theme.
Learning Outcomes
Storybook Alive supports literacy, emotional development, and moral reflection through a structured quiz and story conclusion.
My Favourite Days promotes tech literacy and awareness of future careers, anchored in cultural familiarity.
All The Magic In Your Hands focuses on practical environmental knowledge, teaching children how to creatively reuse materials around them.
Replay Value & Tone
Storybook Alive is designed for high replayability through interactivity and emotional depth, with a tone that is whimsical and engaging.
My Favourite Days offers moderate replay value, best suited to narrative re-visitation with a reflective and inspirational tone.
All The Magic In Your Hands has lower replay value, with play driven by interest in recycling tasks; the tone is educational and playful.
Unique Strengths
Storybook Alive excels in combining universal storytelling with immersive play, appealing across cultural contexts.
My Favourite Days bridges local culture with futuristic vision, providing relevance for Singaporean readers.
All The Magic In Your Hands uniquely enhances everyday experiences by turning domestic spaces into learning environments.
7. Moodboard
For our art direction and colour palette, we decided to go for a whimsical, cartoonish flat design with bold colours and simple shapes, ideal for children’s books.
8. Mock Designs / Prototypes
For our interaction and animation ideas, we have a few concepts in mind:
Page 1: Tap the egg → it gently wiggles or glows
Page 2: Tap the sun → a warm light effect appears
Page 3: Tap the egg → a caterpillar hatches; tap the caterpillar → it wiggles
Fruit Pages: Tap a fruit → bite animation with a crunch sound
Final Page: Tap the cocoon → a butterfly emerges and flutters across the screen
Reflection
This task really helped me understand what experience design involves on a much deeper level. At first, the open brief felt a bit overwhelming—we had the freedom to choose any topic, any app, any idea, which made the possibilities feel endless. But once my groupmate, Iman, and I started narrowing down ideas, it became an exciting opportunity to build something we were genuinely interested in. We were especially focused on making sure our concept wasn’t just creative, but also meaningful and engaging from a user’s perspective.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was realising the difference between coming up with fun, ambitious ideas and actually figuring out how to implement them realistically. Early in the process, we had lots of ideas we were excited about—from AR sign language apps (which is still super cool!) to others, but once we started thinking in terms of what we could actually achieve in Unity—given our current skills and the project timeline—we had to scale things back and rework them. This step was frustrating at times, but it taught me how important it is to balance creative ambition with technical feasibility.
I took on most of the responsibility for designing the mockups and prototypes while Iman did a lot of the app planning and current experience analysis. This really shaped how I thought about the user experience. I created simple animated videos using FlipaClip and converted them into GIFs using an external website to help visualise how some of the interactions would look—for example, the egg wiggling, the sun rising and the caterpillar hatching. Even though I had only used FlipaClip once before during my foundation year, I decided to relearn it for this assignment so we could present our ideas in a more dynamic and engaging way. It was time-consuming but muscle memory (and the intro tutorial!) really rewarding to see our concepts come to life through motion.
I also worked on the wireframe for the quiz using Figma, which made me think more practically about interface layout, user flow, and how to create something intuitive for young users. Creating these mockups helped me bridge the gap between conceptual thinking and practical design—it wasn’t just about what looked good, but how each interaction would feel and function in a real experience.
Additionally, I did the proposed app section which helped me think of what the AR app really needed and how it can be expanded and improved on in the future. Alongside this, we collaborated on the current experiences section providing one app each to compare with our proposed app, Storybook Alive.
Looking at existing projects and analysing how they approached AR storytelling helped us understand how carefully considered every design choice needs to be—from pacing and visuals to emotional engagement and learning outcomes. Overall, this project gave me more confidence in my ability to turn abstract ideas into user-centered design elements, and made me more aware of the small but meaningful details that shape an interactive and immersive experience.
Important Links
Iman’s E-Portfolio:
https://designsbyiman.blogspot.com/2025/05/experiential-design-task-2-project.html
Sophia’s E-Portfolio:
https://sophiareeza.blogspot.com/2025/06/experiential-design-task-2-proposal.html
Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-79RLVLdkeoZCCYlKiRselR6leFM4Ilv?usp=sharing
Project Proposal Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HP6Al7E4TyyPx79Lipu8LVKYQZN8Ua96bR_8-ZLAThw/edit?usp=sharing
Project Proposal Presentation Slides:
Project Proposal Presentation Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YulopkpSpvk
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