CRAFT: Exploring Wearable Creative AI on Smart Glasses for Fiction Writing in Real-World Contexts

2026-07-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitation of existing AI writing tools in perceiving and transforming spontaneous creative inspiration arising from real-world contexts. To bridge this gap, the authors propose CRAFT, a novel approach that integrates context-awareness with a reality-to-fiction transformation mechanism within a wearable smart glasses platform. Through a three-phase field study, the system enables immediate capture of serendipitous insights and supports human-AI collaborative micro-creation, preserving the user’s authorial agency while enhancing creative fluency. Empirical results demonstrate that participants generated richer fictional content from everyday incidental experiences, confirming the feasibility and innovative potential of CRAFT in blurring the boundary between lived experience and artistic creation.

Abstract

Creative writing increasingly integrates AI assistance, yet current tools miss in-situ moments when writers draw inspiration from real-world experiences. We envision Context-aware Reality-Fiction Transformation (CRAFT), an approach for AI glasses that translates daily experiences into fiction narratives. We explored its desirability, feasibility, and potential viability through three studies. Interviews with nine writers yielded desires and three design goals: 1) augmenting in-situ perception to bridge reality-fiction gaps, 2) promoting authenticity grounded in real-world experiences while maintaining fictionalization, and 3) preserving creative agency, enjoyment, and life-art boundaries. Co-design workshops with 16 writers and researchers operationalized these goals into concrete interaction mechanisms using a technology probe. We then conducted supported field trials with eight writers across 24 sessions using a refined probe, revealing writer-perceived benefits (e.g., enriched fictional ideas from serendipitous encounters), emergent practices (e.g., micro-creation), and design considerations for future sustained use. We contribute design explorations for the CRAFT approach, offering design implications and empirical insights on ubiquitous human-AI creative collaboration in everyday life.

Problem

• creative writing
• AI assistance
• in-situ inspiration
• reality-fiction gap
• wearable AI

Innovation

• wearable AI
• smart glasses
• creative writing
• context-aware transformation
• human-AI collaboration