Google Patents Idea Of Interactive Books With Augmented Reality

If Google has its way we will no longer be waiting for the film adaptation of our favourite books. Google has recently been awarded two patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for its ideas about books with augmented reality. The first idea is about a media enhanced pop-up book that works with the help of regular books and an electronic tablet. In a media enhanced pop-up book the physical pages can be associated with media content running on the tablet. Whenever you turn the pages of your pop-up book its associated video content gets projected on to the tablet’s screen. So how does the application on the tablet know which page you are on? Well, that is being planned to do with help of NFC. Each page will have an NFC tag that gets picked up by the NFC sensor on the tablet signalling it to display the appropriate content.


The second idea is however much cooler. The idea about a storytelling device, now the name might not sound that exciting but wait till you learn more about it. At the heart of this interactive book lies a small video projector that will project video around the book. The projector will be controlled by the pressure sensor embedded in the pages and invoked by turning pages of the book. There will also be a small speaker in the pages of the book that plays the sound track associated with that particular scene. The video will be stored on the book itself and the projector which is placed in the middle will project the story for the users. The best thing about this augmented reality books is that the viewer does not need to wear any AR glasses or view them through an app.


The only problem here is that the ideas are just in concept form. They may never be produced in real life by Google. So we have to keep our fingers crossed.

Source: USPTO (1) (2) Via Engadget