What’s New in Books

The MagicBook explores seamless transition between reality and virtual reality. When users look at the pages of a real book through a hand held display, they are able to see virtual content superimposed over the real pages, that is augmented reality. When they see an augmented reality scene they like, users can fly into the scene and experience it as an immersive virtual environment. Currently the user can transition smoothly between these two fixed viewing modes: the augmented-reality view and the virtual-reality view.

The MagicBook also features functionality that supports collaboration: When several users look at the same book page they can see the augmented reality image from their own viewpoint. When one of these users decides to switch to the Virtual Reality mode and “fly” into the virtual model, the other users are able see him or her as a virtual character in the scene.
The MagicBook is created by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand, part of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Download a demo of the MagicBook software and check out the video. [blogged by Lene Mailund on Digital Experience]

The Book Radio is a design project by Vinay Venkatraman & Pei Yu from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. The Book Radio appears to be a regular looking sketch book, but sensors and a microcontroller embedded in the spine allows its users to actually scan radio channels just by flipping the pages of the book. Book marking of radio stations and annotation of favourite programs by writing on to the relevant pages are also supported, and the volume can be changed by sliding the associated book mark.

The Book Radio is wireless and holds no screens, dials or buttons. Thus, the project is concerned with exploring the possibilities of creating intuitive and subtle interfaces.

Check out video 1 and 2 of the Book Radio. [blogged by Lene Mailund on Digital Experience]