My name is George Bairaktaris and I am a PhD student
at the Advanced Technology Institute of University of Surrey.
I’m David Frohlich, I’m director of the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey,
and also principal investigator on the Next Generation Paper project.
I am Dr Radu Sporea, I am a senior lecturer
at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey.
The aim of the Next Generation Paper project is to connect paper to the web
in a new kind of augmented reading experience.
Imagine being able to browse through a printed book
but to also touch on printed hotlinks
which bring up extra information
on a nearby smartphone or a television across the room.
In this way you could have multimedia illustrations to the text,
immersive pictures or sounds,
links to websites or people,
and maybe personalisation of content specific to you as a reader.
People still really like paper, the smell and the look and the feel of it,
but the extra information brings it to life in new ways,
so for the travel guide, for example, it gives it local flavour and colour and accent,
it gives you an insight into the locations you might be visiting through video or image and sound,
and it could be personalised with your own pictures and video when you travel.
People really do like the paper and screen reading experience,
more than reading on paper alone.
In this project we are introducing two new generations of paper.
Assuming normal paper is the first generation, the second generation paper
uses an advanced image recognition algorithm to detect the open page
and provide additional digital content.
In the third generation technology a physical book
is augmented with printed and commercial electronics creating a hybrid device.
In this interactivity track, we will be presenting two generations of the 3G paper devices;
the augmented book, or the a-book, and the Magic BookMark.
With the a-book, the user would consume the printed information
and with a simple, yet familiar interaction with the book, like the touch of a button,
it would trigger automatically digital content on a nearby display.
Photosensors embedded in the paper automatically recognise the open page.
This way the user doesn’t need to interact with any electronic device at all.
The control electronics are incorporated in the cover
and are optimised for low cost and long battery life.
Even the smallest details of the system, like wireless charging,
are designed to hide the electronics from the user.
The solution that we have chosen for page recognition
is really quite versatile but has some significant limitations.
The prototype that we have designed uses
optical page recognition embedded in each page.
Because the technology is not quite up to speed yet,
we cannot directly print the photosensors on the pages.
So we are constrained to using lamination techniques.
On the one hand, this makes the pages thicker and harder to handle,
and on the other, it complicates our fabrication process,
reducing the throughput and increasing the cost.
The second demonstrator, the Magic BookMark,
is addressing these handling and manufacturability problems.
The electronics and sensing elements are abstracted from the paper book
and designed as a separate device,
incorporated in an electronically augmented bookmark.
Photosensors are now part of the bookmark which is recognising
an optical pattern on the inside of each page.
All the user needs to do, is place the bookmark behind the active page,
and the multimedia content would become available on a nearby display,
such as a mobile phone.
The rest of the interaction, including the multimedia consumption and maintenance,
is making use of the ecosystem developed as part of the Next Generation Paper project.
With the Magic BookMark, the interaction becomes more seamless
and does not compromise the paper feel of the book.
The device architecture itself is compatible with existing manufacturing techniques,
which makes this a sustainable manufacturable product
that can augment a wide range of paper objects,
such as soft and hard cover books, and leaflets.
We are proposing several methods for augmenting paper
specifically for page recognition in books.
Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages
and we are exploring ways in which we can maintain
the bookness of the objects that we are augmenting.