Inspired by the physical affordances of hand cranks and shutters which are the original interfaces of movie projectors and cameras, the physical form factor of Narratron takes on the minimalist design approach with an intent to create frictionless user experience.

The history of hand shadow play is nearly untraceable which was prevalently practiced long before the existence of Greek shadow show Karagiozis or Chinese shadow puppetry Pi Ying Xi. It is a prelinguistic and transcultural form of storytelling that entertains and educates the younger generation; it is also a stimuli of creative production, by mimicking the things we see, and by telling the stories we relate. Narratron, in that sense, has deeply embedded AI into this intelligent collective effort of hands, eyes, and brains as a true “fairytale copilot”. Its nature of multimodality that combines visual, auditory, tactile, and textual I/O, supported by the collaboration of  LLM, image classifier, speech synthesizer and diffusion models, demonstrates how seamlessly we are able to make bodily interactions with AI. Through bridging the digital and the physical, we are now connecting the ancient and the future.