The Reading Glove is the first component of a research agenda called the TUNE Project (Tangible, Ubiquitous, Narrative Environment).  I am pursuing this ongoing research work along with my husband, Josh Tanenbaum. TUNE is a story, a space, a game, and a research instrument. It investigates questions of interactive narrative, player modeling, adaptivity, and tangible embodied interaction.

The Reading Glove is the first prototype connected to the TUNE environment.  It is a wearable interface that allows readers to experience an interactive narrative by picking up objects that have been augmented with story fragments.  You can watch a video of the Reading Glove and find details of the design process on our blog. We have written several papers on the project, which can be found in the reference list below.  We are currently conducting user studies in preparation for a journal article on tangibility and narrative.

The Reading Glove project is currently funded as part of the GRAND NCE network.

Project Publications:

Karen Tanenbaum and Josh Tanenbaum (2010) Agency as Commitment to Meaning: Communicative Competence in Games. Digital Creativity, v. 21 No. 1, 2010, pp. 11-17. Available on Informaworld

Josh Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Marek Hatala (2010) Authoring Tangible Interactive Narratives Using Cognitive Hyperlinks, 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT3) at Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG 2010), June 18, 2010, Monterey, California, 8 pages. Download PDF

Josh Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum and Alissa Antle (2010) The Reading Glove: designing interactions for object-based tangible storytelling. In Proceedings of the 1st Augmented Human International Conference (Megeve, France, April 2-3), ACM Press, pp. 132-140. Download PDF

Karen Tanenbaum & Josh Tanenbaum (2009) Commitment to Meaning: A Reframing of Agency in Games. In the Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Digital Arts and Culture (DAC). December 12-15, Irvine, USA, 9 pages. Download PDF

Josh Tanenbaum and Karen Tanenbaum, (2008) Improvisation and Performance as Models for Interacting with Stories, in Interactive Storytelling, LNCS 5334, Erfuhrt, Germany. Ulrike Spierling & Nicolas Szilas, Eds. First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2008, p. 250-263. Download PDF