Calliope

Calliope is the follow-up to the NeverEnding Drawing Machine. A portable, paper-based platform for interactive story making, it allows physical editing of shared digital media at a distance. The system is composed of a network of creation stations that seamlessly blend analog and digital media. Calliope documents and displays the creative process with no need to interact directly with a computer. By using human-readable tags and allowing any object to be used as material for creation, it offers opportunities for cross-cultural and cross-generational collaboration among peers with expertise in different media.

Inspired by the Surrealists' Exquisite Corpse art game, the NeverEnding Drawing project is one of several applications developed on a scalable architecture and platform for collaborative creativity. Users co-create and edit each other's augmented sketchbooks in real time. By tracking individual pages of each live sketchbook, the system loads the appropriate background audiovisual content and enables users to add to it using a variety of real materials and means of mark-making. Users take pictures and record sounds to be sent back and forth between collaborators on the network. Additionally, the live sketchbooks facilitate non-linear, asynchronous access to the evolving, co-created content through their physical editing interface. By using crayons, colored pens, and various tactile and light-diffusing materials, the analog/digital hybrid model of content creation requires no expertise and creates a safe environment for sharing unfinished work with others.

Stories inform, inspire, educate, enchant, and entertain. The Never-Ending Drawing Machine is an immersive, creative experience where the story never ends!

The Never-Ending Drawing Machine is a paper-based platform that blends physical and digital techniques for story creation and allows asynchronous viewing and physical editing of shared content at a distance. Users can embed voices and soundtracks to their stories, draw over spoken narrative or collage digital and analog content. The interface maps pre-created digital media and newly captured analog content onto specific pages in the book, while bi-directional capturing and sending of media permits co-edition of the same page. Captured images are archived and displayed as a new layer over previous content on any other creation-station, collocated or at a distance. The Never-Ending Drawing Machine is also a display and communication platform.

Developed as an open-ended platform for co-creative and collaborative play, the NEDM has many possibilities including: a powerful communication tool, an engaging interface for storybook reading and writing, a sharing medium for distance collaboration, a formal learning and teaching tool, a performance art device, an exploration into cooperative authorship, and a documentation instrument to archive and research narrative styles.