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Semi-Finalist in the Christopher Columbus Foundation Award, sponsored by Discover Magazine.

The Living Book of the Senses extends the traditional book into a fundamentally new sensorially interactive experience. It is a tangible, sensing media that responds to the tactile and bodily state of its user(s) to re-map our senses in a transmediated space. With the Living Book we are able to see and sense our physical surroundings while dynamically engaging with multi-sensory three-dimensional mixed realities.

User-controlled dialog with the book elicits textured responses/answers from the book (expressed in digital data: visual, textual, auditory, tangible quivers). The Living Book becomes a provocative new sensory experience, where participants' bodily states transform the temporal narratives. When the user asks the book a query (via voice recognition), the Living Book responds with cross-sensory narratives influenced by the users' bodily states. In re-casting and re-mapping our senses the Living Book creates an animate and reflexive experience.

In this mixed reality experience, users wear a head-tracker system that enables them to see physical reality enhanced with a virtual reality overlay. Users can touch and physically interact with this tactile book which responds to physical states (via biofeedback, piezo sensors, actuators). The book responds to individual and multiple physical states to express resulting changes in narrative.

The narrative is a cultural history of the senses. The Living Book is an enhanced learning tool that enables users to become aware of their sensorial experience and bodily states. Collaborations using this book enable distance learning with multiple user interactions. The Living Book can be used in any narrative-based media to create dynamic communication between any number of people.

Technical Description: ARToolkit

The camera inputs images/patterns and feeds them back into the ARToolkit software which then displays digital information associated with the physical markers onto the headset. The ARToolkit calculates camera position and orientation relative to physical markers in real time for video-mediated reality. Each reader can view AR scenes from their own visual perspective.