Restoration of traditional Chinese shadow play‐Piying art from tangible interaction

Abstract Piying, the world's intangible culture heritage, is a characteristic Chinese folk shadow play and one of the origins of modern movie. The spirit of traditional Piying is to express rich emotion and stories through impromptu action change by professional artists. Now Piying gradually fades away in people's lives, encountering the risk of extinction. We focus on transforming the traditional Piying play into an interactive system, which can be seamlessly performed by ordinary people and bring a strong sense of immersion to the users. Two interactive systems were developed, with Kinect‐based interaction or sensors, users can create own digital Piying animations by employing their body movement as input. A field study was presented with 20 students in a primary school. The result showed that our system was far more effective in emotion induction and Piying understanding than traditional one. We demonstrated this system in a charitable foundation and a workshop of a tangible conference. It is also honored to be collected by China's intangible cultural heritage network. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.