The Augmented Book

The Augmented Book: Sherwood Rise 30 January 2015 at 14:48 From 2012-13 I carried out practice-based research for the UNESCO future of the book project. The aim was to consider the future of the book using new media technology, particularly Augmented Reality (AR) on mobile phones. My research question was: How could digital media and physical books work together and interact to make a coherent story? I set about making an interactive story where participatory interaction with digital media via AR would change the content of a physical book/ codex. Areas I researched were: AR as a revealing technology (e.g. X ray specs), the aesthetics of AR - the creative possibilities of collage in 3D space, contested content, and the real/ physical versus virtual/ digital. A professional scriptwriter wrote an updated version of the Robin Hood tale, called “Sherwood Rise”. I reworked this into an interactive structure, and built the interactive story in the format of an email narrative using AR and printed newspapers (a compromise for the physical book). Readers interacted through the AR, updating databases, which altered the newspaper version they received the next day. Feedback from readers showed numerous problems; design issues, confusing user experience and interactive story structure, and problems with the script. Interaction via the AR proved clumsy and obtrusive. Flipping between digital and physical media made the story feel disconnected. My paper talks about how digital media and physical books could work together and interact as coherent stories, and discusses the viability of my experiment as a possible model for the future of the book. The paper outlines my intended solutions to the reported problems. It describes my further research into the subject of real versus virtual, and suggests new approaches for digital and print stories to combine and interact in interesting ways.