BookAlive

How many tourists visit libraries or historical archives? It is not very far from the truth to say very few. And yet, libraries and archives contain true treasures about the history of a people. The main reason is that the books cannot be visited: they are delicate, precious, unique. It is not possible, in most cases, to touch them, leaf through them, look at them.

Preserving and making available contents of a library or a historical archive is considered today a priority and a strategic element for the dissemination of culture and overcoming the digital divide. This is the aim of the BookAlive project, designed and led by InformAmuse for providing novel fruition models for cultural heritage.

The USI group cooperated with InformAmuse to build a novel interface for interacting with content from ancient books. This solution provides an innovative and multimodal exploration of book illustrations, using both touch and touchless gestures, allowing people for both near and far distance interaction.

Project Website: bookalive.informamuse.com

Partners: InformAmuse S.r.l.

Publications

• V. Gentile, S. Sorce, G. Russo, D. Pirrone, and A. Gentile, “A Multimodal Fruition Model for Graphical Contents in Ancient Books,” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies 2016, New York, NY, USA, 2016, pp. 65-72.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Gentile2016CompSysTech,
  author = {Vito Gentile and Salvatore Sorce and Giuseppe Russo and Dario Pirrone and Antonio Gentile},
  title = {{A Multimodal Fruition Model for Graphical Contents in Ancient Books}},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies 2016}},
  series = {{CompSysTech '16}},
  year = 2016,
  isbn = {978-1-4503-4182-0},
  location = {Palermo, Italy},
  pages = {65--72},
  numpages = {8},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2983468.2983477},
  doi = {10.1145/2983468.2983477},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  keywords = {Interaction design, cultural heritage, live motion capture, multimodal interaction, touchless interaction},
  }