TangramTheatre

The tangram is a jigsaw-like traditional Chinese art form rich in wittiness and expressiveness. However, there is an absence of efficient support to create animations for children and novice users after designing tangram characters. Thus, we present TangramTheatre, a performance-driven animation tool that combines both creation and animation of physical and virtual characters. TangramTheatre allows users to create characters using seven physical tangram pieces as what they do in real tangram games and then edit animations of these characters. In this paper we present our proof of concept prototype. A preliminary study was conducted to direct a future empirical study with children. The results show that all of the participants express great interests in TangramTheatre.