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Multisensorial tangible user interface for immersive storytelling: a usability pilot study with a visually impaired child

Haptic and multisensory exploration helps blind children to create mental images and abstract mental processes; it is crucial, then, to organize the learning environment so that they can interact with objects through different sensorimotor channels. Storytelling and narratives are useful practices to develop linguistic, cognitive, emotional and social skills and visually impaired children need to participate in the narrative experience using their body, manipulating objects, listening but also smelling and tasting. New methodologies for interactive storytelling, such as a multisensory Tangible User Interface (TUI), could sustain innovative educative and cognitive interventions to listen and stimulate narratives of children with visual impairments, since the residual senses and abilities are supported and compensated. The purpose of this article is both to describe a multisensory TUI-based methodology developed for the enhancement of the storytelling activity and to present a first usability and engagement pilot study based on a prototype. One 6-years old visually impaired child participated in the study. The procedure involved a TUI pre-training phase and the storytelling phase, in which the participant listened to and interacted with a TUI-augmented story. Data, such as participants’ behavior, satisfaction, engagement and TUI’s usability, were collected through observations and specific questionnaires adapted to the participant. Results of the pilot study showed a good level of usability and overall engagement, but above all it allowed us to highlight strengths and weaknesses that we need to address for the improvement of the technology. Future studies’ directions are discussed.