3Book: A Scalable 3D Virtual Book

The use of technology can enhance the learning process, making topics easier to cover, reduce the time, and cost efficient. One of these technologies is 3Book: A Scalable 3D Virtual Book. The 3Book is a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for various digital library and sensemaking systems. It has the ability to represent books in 3D animated format and allows users to read large format books, and has features to enhance and support sensemaking operations by readers.
Previous book-like interfaces started with Catalogues, TabWorks, WebBook, and Early 3Book.
They developed a prototype 3D electronic codex book called the 3Book (see figure 1). The 3Book open to a double page of text as the reader turns a block of pages. The reader can turn individual pages by touching them or turn blocks of pages by touching the fore edge of the book. The ability of the 3Book to operate on a full book at interactive speeds depends heavily on the underlying engine.
British Library has developed a museum oriented electronic 3D books. The pages can be turned by finger (in the Library itself) or by mouse in a reduced-size Web version. But such system has some technological limitations.
Some technological forces may impede adoption this technology are the size of the book and memory consuming. For example, large book presents very strong challenges the reason behind they the true 3D books have generally been small. For example, the British Library Lindisfarne Gospels and others referenced earlier are also 3D books, but only about 40 of the pages are included—not entire books. The animation images are actually photographs of intermediate points during page turning. One version of the system consumes 304MB for only 20 book pages.
Check the link for more information: http://www.parc.com/publication/1374/3book.html



Figure 1. 3Book. (a) 3Book in closed position, (b) Turning a block of pages.