The trend of melding virtual information with the real world to create augmented reality, together with the growing popularity of electronic readers will inevitably lead to some sort of highly interactive electronic book hybrid. Electronic paper—providing Harry Potter-esque moving images on flexible, paper-like materials—has long been in the works and color electronic ink seems just around the corner.
Part of me is excited for the day when children’s books have characters that literally pop out of the pages, not on folding paper but as rich, virtual representations. But creators of these devices will have to take care that books don’t turn into portable movie screens but preserve what makes reading so enjoyable: ample room for the reader’s imagination to reconstruct the author’s world.
Here are two recent demonstrations of how AR books might look:
Augmented Reality. from Moving Brands. A user can hold up a blank cover to a webcam can see different projections on it.
This children’s dragon encyclopedia, recently released in the UK shows a three-dimensional dragon on the book’s pages when viewed on a computer. A computer uses a webcam to superimpose the dragon animation on the video feed of the book. it is responsive: users can rotate the book to see different angles of the dragon in real-time.
Pretty cool, but these products will be really nifty when they start projecting virtual objects into actual space, so we won’t have to look at a screen to see the animation. Given how hard it is to track objects in different lighting conditions with minimal equipment, commercial projections of this type will probably be a few years away at least.
Updated 10.27.09
Red Bull magazine, The Red Bulletin, has commercial AR ads in its October 25th edition. Pages with a bull’s eye (nine of them) play videos and animation when you view them through a webcam. See a video if it in action here. (via Bright Side of News)
