View the PDF document How to turn the page

Chu, Y., Witten, I. H., Lobb, R., Bainbridge, D. (2003) C. C. Marshall, G. Henry and L. Delcambre (eds), Proc Third ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’03), Houston, Texas, 186-188. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California.

Can digital libraries provide a reading experience that more closely resembles a real book than a scrolled or paginated electronic display? This paper describes a prototype page-turning system that realistically animates full three-dimensional page-turns. The dynamic behavior is generated by a mass-spring model defined on a rectangular grid of particles. The prototype takes a PDF or E-book file, renders it into a sequence of PNG images representing individual pages, and animates the pageturns under user control. The simulation behaves fairly naturally, although more computer graphics work is required to perfect it.