Creating opportunities for play : the influence of multimodal feedback on open-ended play

In this paper, we investigate how providing multiple feedback modalities affects open-ended play with interactive toys. We designed a play object which reacts to children's physical behaviour by providing multimodal feedback and we compared it with a unimodal variant, focusing on the experience and creativity of the children. In open-ended play children create their own games inspired by the interaction with a play object. We show how the modalities affect the number of games played, the type and diversity of games that the children created, and the way children used the different feedback modalities as inspiration for their games. Furthermore, we discuss the consequences of our design choices on open-ended play.