Inspiration 

Augmented Reality is considered as a new business market with potential growth. Many companies now employ the Augmented Reality in marketing, advertising, and products. Especially, education and publishing companies start to invest in digital book market. In Korea, Samsung publishing company launched a children’s AR book in last December. They implemented a mobile application that can be used for the children’s AR book. I found this interesting, because I am interested in educational software development. Therefore, I decided to create one by myself as a final project.

Project Description

ARbook is an interactive children’s book that provides storytelling 2D image using Augmented Reality. With this project, I attempt to create an educational technology for children’s literacy development. My main goal is to motivate and engage users while they read the whole story. Motivation and engagement are very important factors that keep children’s attention on reading for a long period of time.

I decided to employ Augmented Reality in my project, because it can easily interact with audience, and many children find it interesting. Therefore, I thought that Augmented Reality could be a prime factor to engage and motivate children.

The ARbook allows users to read the story and see the corresponding image at the same time. This prohibits misunderstanding and incorrect transfer of storytelling of the book. A web-cam camera is attached to the book, so users are required to capture AR code on the book with the camera in order to view the corresponding scene, and each scene is displayed on computer screen.

Process/Prototype

I decided to implement the ARbook using  Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. Primary reason for choosing this book is my personal taste. When I was a kid, I really enjoyed reading this book, and as a child, this story taught me a lot of moral lessons. This book is not just a children’s short story, but it includes ethics, moralities, climax, and both happy and sad ending. The ending of this book can be interpreted as happy or sad depending on a reader’s perspective. Secondary reason for choosing this book is to teach young children being selfless. Each scene of The Giving Tree contains valuable lessons for life.

For artistic part of my project, I drew each scene by hand on a paper, and I scanned the each scene for editing on a computer. Then, I used After Effects and Photoshop to color and animate scenes.

For technical part of my project, I used ARtoolkit library and JMyron web-cam in Processing. I added different patterns of AR codes so the web-cam recognizes each pattern. After storing each pattern on the system, I associated each scene’s image to each pattern.  During the process, I had to compute every AR code’s vertices, so the corresponding image pops up on a right location.

Images

 Video

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRoObZQxol0]