Magic Bookmark: A Nonintrusive Electronic System for Functionalizing Physical Books

Abstract

The use of physical paper is often preferred due to its unique physical properties that improve various aspects of reading. However, digital media and information are more engaging, diverse, and up to date, thereby challenging the existence of paper in our everyday life. By combining the two types of media in a seamless way, the interactivity of multimedia content can complement the reading experience, maintaining the unique feel of paper books. The current state of the art addressing this application negatively impacts the reading experience and often does not consider the manufacturability and sustainability of the proposed solutions. Herein, the Magic Bookmark, a technical solution for automatically recognizing the open page of a physical book, to provide seamless augmentation without changing the user's behavior and experience significantly is introduced. Three alternative solutions are implemented, with various degrees of ease of use, manufacturability at scale, and reliability of data reading. The optimal realization is found to be a reflective optical readout array, for which routes to implementation that may allow blending the graphical and functional aspects of the augmented book are proposed.

Investigating Tangible and Hybrid Interactions to Augment the Reading Experience

“…Given the work of this thesis, we hope to have created a platform for future research within the areas presented where others may take the work we presented and overcome the limitations we discovered. We believe this has already begun with the Magic Bookmark [14,12], a digital bookmark device using the same techniques as ours. In addition, they use custom electronics to become more compact and closer to our vision of the digital bookmark of being completely flat.…”

“…In Chapter 5 we explore methods of synchronising digital and physical books using TUIs and conductive materials. Following the work of this thesis, more research has been performed within this area [14].…”

“…More recently, researchers have looked into mimicking the physical process of bookmarking [132,14,12]. The most advanced of these is Magic Bookmark [14],…”

“…Later Bairaktari et al [14] present the Magic Bookmark device. The magic bookmark introduces the same concept and uses the same technique as our LDR bookmark, using photovoltaics rather than light-dependent resistors.…”

“…The existing work tends to seek to create a link between physical notebooks and a digital copy [91,108,149,67]. Others have built on our ideas in their prototypes [14,12].…”