27 Mobile Haptic E-Book System to Support 3D Immersive Reading in Ubiquitous Environments KAZI MASUDUL ALAM, ABU SALEH MD MAHFUJUR RAHMAN, and ABDULMOTALEB EL SADDIK, Multimedia Communications Laboratory, University of Ottawa and NYU Abu Dhabi In order to leverage the use of various modalities such as audio-visual materials in instilling effective learning behavior we present an intuitive approach of annotation based hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials such as e-books. By integrating the home entertainment system in the user’s reading experience combined with haptic interfaces we want to examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the user’s learning patterns. The proposed Haptic E– Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating image, video, 3D environment based augmented display in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience in the popular mobile e-book platform. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Evaluation/ methodology; H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems—Human Information Processing General Terms: Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Haptic modality, multimodal interface, edutainment system, mobile learning ACM Reference Format: Alam, K. M., Rahman, A. S. M. M., and El Saddik, A. 2013. Mobile haptic e-book system to support 3D immersive reading in ubiquitous environments. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 9, 4, Article 27 (August 2013), 20 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2501643.2501649 1. INTRODUCTION Recently, handheld mobile devices are widely adopting the increasingly popular haptic feedbacks in their touch screen based interfaces [Brewster et al. 2007; Hoggan et al. 2008]. Ubiquitous mobile de- vices are currently used to access a wide variety of information including learning materials. The challenge is now to find new avenues of applications, in order to leverage the haptic sensory feedbacks through mobile devices in developing learning applications, so that interactive storytelling becomes more appealing to users. To satisfy the demand of the ubiquitous computing age, Park et al. [2010] suggested a book evolution framework in their survey which identifies three dimensions of book evo- lution: digitalization, augmentation and hypermediation. They also recommended three research and Authors’ addresses: K. M. Alam, A. S. M. M. Rahman, and A. El Saddik, Multimedia Communications Laboratory, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Ave, Ottawa, Canada; email: ffmalam@discover.uottawa.ca, {fkafi, abed}@mcrlabg.uottawa.ca. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2013 ACM 1551-6857/2013/08-ART27 $15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2501643.2501649 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, Vol. 9, No. 4, Article 27, Publication date: August 2013.