Turning Pages of 3D Electronic Books
Lichan Hong, Stuart K. Card, and Jindong (JD) Chen
Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
{hong, card, jchen}@parc.com
A
BSTRACT
Taking the form of physical books, virtual 3D books can be used
as basic components of e-book systems, information workspaces,
and digital libraries. This paper describes the page turning design
of 3Book, a 3D book system that we recently developed. Our
design aims to find a sensible balance among important factors
such as visual realism, readability, interactivity, and scalability.
To convey the impression of reading or viewing an actual physical
book, we model all the faces of the book and synchronize the
movements of various portions of the book during page turning.
Our design delivers a seamless transition between two states of
the book (i.e., when it is lying still and when it is turning pages).
In addition, we deform the turning pages around an imaginary
cone of changing sizes to produce realistically-looking curved
pages.
CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information
Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Graphical User
Interfaces; I.7.4 [Document and Text Processing]: Electronic
Publishing; H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]:
Hypertext/Hypermedia—User Issues; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]:
Methodology and Techniques—Interaction Techniques.
Keywords: 3D book, 3D workspace, digital library, electronic
publishing, visual design, user interface.
1I
NTRODUCTION
In the past few years, several projects were initiated to digitize
large amounts of books and documents. For example, the Million
Book Project of Carnegie Mellon University aims to scan one
million seminal books and make them freely available to the
public [18]. Amazon.com has a web-based feature called “Search
Inside the Book”, which allows a customer to search millions of
pages to find the book that she wants to purchase [1]. Recently,
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft announced separate plans to
digitize millions of printed books and make them searchable over
the Web.
In order to capture the look and feel of a physical book in its
electronic correspondent, the British Library has developed an
interactive system called “Turning the Pages” [3]. Using
animations, visitors can virtually turn pages of precious books or
manuscripts, including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Sherborne
Missal. Additionally, Zinio Reader [23] and FlipViewer [14] are
two commercial products displaying electronic pages in a 3D
form simulating the appearance of a real book.
Although the value of 3D vs. 2D is still under considerable
debates [8,9], all these efforts suggest the interest in adopting a
3D book metaphor. As a visually enhanced object [5,p463], a
book metaphor taps into the user’s familiarity with physical
books. From the user’s perspective, whether a book is a physical
book or a virtual book being shown on a computer screen, “turn to
the picture in the middle of page 124” has the same meaning.
Another usage of virtual 3D books is as design elements in 3D
workspaces. Examples of 3D workspaces include the Task
Gallery of Microsoft [19], Project Looking Glass of Sun [21],
Miramar of Intel [17], and Workscape of Maya [2]. Furthermore,
a book metaphor can be employed in 3D digital libraries to
represent textbooks or conference proceedings [12].
Generally speaking, a book has two major states: when it is
lying still and when it is turning pages. One of the technical
challenges in creating a 3D book is designing a mechanism for
turning the pages. Such a mechanism generates an animation
showing what the book looks like at different points of page
turning. In our opinion, a good mechanism should come with the
following properties:
• Free from visual artifacts. No noticeable visual artifacts are
produced when transitioning between the two states of the
book.
• Sufficient realism. The virtual page turning resembles a
physical page turning. This does not necessarily mean that a
physical model depicting the details of turning pages has to
be employed. Rather, the page turning needs to be
sufficiently natural so that it does not deviate from the book
metaphor.
• Single or multiple pages. The mechanism is able to turn one
page or multiple pages at a time.
• Computable in real time. The animation is computable in real
time, allowing the user to examine different pages of the
book interactively.
• Scalable. The mechanism is scalable to handle books with
large numbers of pages.
2R
ELATED WORK
In the British Library’s “Turning the Pages” project, photographs
were taken at intermediate points during each page turning and
stored in the system using Macromedia Director [10]. When a
visitor turns a page, a corresponding sequence of page turning
images is retrieved from the system and displayed to the visitor.
As a result, one version of the system consumes 304MB for only
twenty book pages [10]. Obviously, the photographing could be
labor intensive and the number of book pages is limited. As an
example, only about 40 pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels are
included.
WebBook, a component that we developed early for the Web
Forager system [6], is a 3D book of HTML pages. The user
assembles web pages into a book by simply dropping them on a
place in the book. Using clicks and gestures, the user can turn
pages, access bookmarks, or click through hyperlinks in the book
to reach other pages. From the perspective of page turning,
159
IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces 2006
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Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI’06)
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