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Tangible Books

Using Books as Tangible Interfaces

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Schrader Participants: Stefan Beck Subjects: Tangible Interfaces, Digital Library

Electronic books offer various advantages over traditional books like full-text searchability or the possibility to extract texts and images, while it is more comfortable for most people to handle and read in traditional books. The Optical Page Identification System OPIS aims to bridge the gap between those two worlds by providing a tangible interface to e-books for library users. In particular, academic libraries, students and other researchers will benefit from the new features and the integration of e-books and the library into their research processes.

This first step of research is focusing on the identification of single books pages in physical books by optical character recognition (OCR) in low-resolution video images. Results show that over 95% of all text based pages can be identified by OPIS in a reasonable amount of time.

The OPIS system could be used in the Interactive Library Table for letting users extract text and drawings out of real books into their electronic documents or to add virtual comments and notes on real books. The system could also be used to browse in an e-book (potentially in another language) using the physical book.

More information can be found at:

• Stefan Beck and Andreas Schrader
  Tangible Books - Virtual Library Interfaces
  Poster Demonstration at the 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive'2006), Dublin, Ireland, May 7-10, 2006.
  Download paper at Pervasive'2006