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ePuppet – A mobile application that automates and expands the digital figure creation process for the eShadow platform

Koukis Alexandros

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Summary

This thesis presents the design, implementation and evaluation of ePuppet, a mobile application that expands the use of eShadow, a digital storytelling platform inspired by the traditional Shadow Theatre, addressing creative expression and learning in the field of cultural heritage. eShadow enables the creation of digital stories within a project-based approach that may start from scenario development and include the creation of digital puppets and sceneries, the set-up and recording of story scenes and the final assembly of a digital story. eShadow supports an inclusive learning framework that enables teachers to design and implement interdisciplinary theme-centered projects in a variety of subjects (language, history, music, computing, etc.) to help students develop cross-curricular (horizontal) skills: speaking and writing skills, social cooperation and research skills, digital and cognitive skills. This ePuppet mobile application that is presented in this thesis enables the users of eShadow to develop their own digital puppets in a way that incorporates the creative process of developing traditional shadow theatre puppets and import them for further use in eShadow. This is achieved by digitizing pictures and drawings through a mobile device’s camera. ePuppet offers two main modes of editing: The first is based on certain templates and facilitates the creation of digital puppets that have a certain structure (i.e. 2-, 3- or 4-part puppets) following the corresponding structure of Greek traditional shadow theatre puppets. The second one enables users to create any kind of puppet with any number of constituent parts. ePuppet is built as a Hybrid Mobile Application using the Ionic Framework for theming and prototyping, Apache Cordova as the native wrapper, granting access to the device’s native features such as the Local Storage and the Camera and Angular 2, which is a set of TypeScript libraries that implement core and optional functionality for mobile applications. The image processing is executed inside the HTML 5 canvas element using the WebGL2.0 JavaScript API as it enables GPU-accelerated usage of image processing and effects as part of the Web Page canvas. Following the design and implementation of ePuppet, a thorough experimentation was undertaken to confirm its usability. The evaluation results show that the mobile application is highly usable and can effectively support the task of digital puppet creation in order to enhance the eShadow experience.

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