Augmented Reality Book Boosts Children’ Motivations for Reading

Posted by MonsterAR on December 7th, 2022

Encouraging children to read has been a tough task for many parents. Children mostly think of reading as a boring activity, making this an opportunity for some to produce Augmented Reality book.

As the name suggests, Augmented Reality book means such that applies Augmented Reality (AR) technology. It is able to add 2D and 3D contents into real environments of the users. Various information in the real environments can be digitally manipulated and made into interactive contents.

How Augmented Reality Book Works

Children really love visuals. This has inspired some to embed AR technology into physical books. In order to making the reading experience impressive, the AR technology is tasked to bring into life many contents in the physical books that are previously rendered as 3D objects or animations.

The AR technology works as follows. It uses AR marker to produce images. Calibrated camera will detect given marker. After recognizing and scanning the marker pattern, the camera will calculate whether the marker is suitable with the existing database. If not, the system won’t process the information of the marker. If yes, the information of the marker will be rendered and turned as 3D objects or animations previously created.

As users, children will experience dynamic and much less boring reading moments. The Augmented Reality book will create multimedia contents that will entertain and educate them at the same time. The multimedia contents will contain text, graphics, video, and audio. To get the experience, children must scan AR marker-based AR books and other supporting study tools with AR tool. The extra information will thus emerge in the form of multimedia.

Not only attractive, but also this sort of book stimulates interaction with children. As parents, this paves the way for deeper reading skill in the future. Children will be encouraged to nurture their reading skills from an early age to prepare them as adult readers that will no longer multimedia content every time they read.

Augmented Reality Book with Coloring

Along with the introduction of Augmented Reality book, this type of book comes with coloring option. This accommodates children who like drawing. This time around, users can color pages of a book. The AR technology will automatically recognize the pages and colors they use. The system will directly map the final result of the colored pages to pop-up virtual scenes and 3D models. The system is based on natural feature detection and picture processing technique that can be easily exploited in all kinds of AR publication applications.

The innovation selects natural feature registration to support augmentation and physical book modification. The registration must be strong enough to enable modification of the book content. If not, small changes to the original pictures will lead to failed registration. A series of filters must be applied to remove as possibly many colors from every frame.

For each video frame, the picture contrast must be maximized to ensure color constancy then balance white color. The distance for every pixel is measured from the line between black and maximum grey grade that may belong to black pixel. The last step of color removal is for the limit of all distance that exceeds score for white color.

When white pages are successfully input, frame is fixed to the same orientation and dimension as with the page pictures used for registration. At the same time, textures are extracted. The registration of page detection is stopped while the new registration process starts for detecting colored pages that require improvements.

Examples of Augmented Reality Coloring

MonsterAR made a special coloring space by combining Augmented Reality Coloring and interactive wall that entertained and educated visitors at Trans Studio in Cibubur.

Another example is Conservation Department of New Zealand that published a coloring book entitled “Amazing Animals of New Zealand” for elementary school kids to educate them on the native animals of the country. The two-page book was given to five kids aged six and eight years old for coloring. Their colored pages were used as samples of application.

Color masking was made for every page where each area was designed to emerge as virtual picture layers colored by separate colors. When frame was taken, letter texture was made for every color. Original picture filled the texture of the background thus color was brought up from the page when pop-up layer emerged.

Every other texture was filled by the repaired pictures taken at the last stage of the registration process. Animation models were made for important objects in scenes. The textures of the models used original pages as the references for mapping. Once the page was detected, the relevant picture area was copied to the buffer of the model texture thus the picture models in the page became textured ones.

Augmented Reality Book in Indonesia

This book type first emerged in the middle of 2018. It’s easy to use this. Simply download a special application to our smartphone or any other devices that are connected to the camera. Next, direct your smartphone camera to AR book in every page that contains special marker. Movable interactive contents with voices will emerge in your real environments, be they are in living room, bedroom or the whole city as in Pokemon Go. Such a fun and interesting way to study, right?