Shadow toy: The children's toy-making system based on paintings

Shadow Puppet Art is a traditional animated storytelling form in ancient China. Because of the development of technology and the impact of modern entertainment, shadow puppet is gradually disappearing. However, this traditional cultural heritage just needs to be retained, inherited and developed. Through our research on children, we find that children always imagine a story in their minds during painting, and such stories can only be expressed statically on paper by brush. In order to protect and inherit shadow puppet art culture and combine with the characteristics of children's drawing, we designed an interactive shadow toy making system that can transform children's static paintings into their own unique interactive shadow toys. The interactive system consists of two parts: the software system that automatically identify the image to split, complement, and generate an image of it being made into a shadow toy, and the intelligent hardware system that provides various interactive modes to the shadow toy. During this process, the children will experience brainstorming, assembling, interacting and demonstrating. While inherit the shadow puppet art culture, they can train their creative abilities by drawing their own works, hands-on skills by assembling the shadow toy and expression ability by telling stories with shadow toy.