"Do you think it is going to be the cock?": using ambient shadow projection in dialogic reading

In this paper we present a lamp prototype that projects controllable shadows to create an ambient backdrop for dialogic reading between parents and their children. The lamp uses four electrochromic displays that allow masking the light and thereby control the shadows that are projected upward onto the ceiling. The displays can switch between general ambience picture and a certain story point in a Smurf book. These displays were used in a reading study with parents reading for their children and a focus group session. The results indicate that the lamp helped in spurring interest and a dialog about the story being read. The used technology proved to be implicitly triggering questions and discussion about the story by creating suspension when switching between the different shadows.