Magic book: Digital storytelling goes physical

Our latest project: The magic book is an interactive installation that enables you to read a digital book without losing the qualities that a normal physical book has. A camera with computer vision software detects the book’s position and a projector shows the appropriate animation to tell a digital story. In this way every blank book can become an animated interactive story that you can flip through and hold in your hands.

The magic book is intended as an installation that can provide visitors to museum information or to flip through the introduction of any book in a library. It can also be used to tell children a story in waiting rooms or playing areas for instance. The installation uses advanced computer vision algorithms to detect the books position and orientation to be able to project the right visuals on top of it. Still the end result has the simplicity of a normal book and can be experienced as such.

The webcam is pointed at the book and feeds images to the computer vision system. This system interprets the location and orientation of the book and then calculates the projection. The projector will then make the story appear on the book as if it was really on paper.