Copyright is held by the author/owner. UIST’06, October 15–18, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland. LIFT-THE-FLAP: A toolkit to realize interactive paper books Shigeru Kobayashi, Minju Yim and Mamiko Yoshida IAMAS 3-95, Ryoke-cho, Ogaki City, Gifu 503-0014 JAPAN +81-584-75-6600 {mayfair, minju05, komi05}@iamas.ac.jp ABSTRACT We introduce a simple toolkit called LIFT-THE-FLAP for interactive paper books. LIFT-THE-FLAP is a combination of capacitive sensing touch sensors embedded in each paper tab of a lift-the-flap book, an I/O module and a media play- back system on a PC. Since a touch sensor is embedded in the paper, the user is not aware of the sensors. The user’s actions working with the lift-the-flap book will be associated naturally corresponding sounds. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and pre- sentation]: User Interfaces. - Input devices and strategies. General terms: Input Device, Real-world interface, GAINER, LIFT-THE-FLAP Keywords: capacitive sensor. INTRODUCTION Many picture books with electronic devices have been re- leased so far. Especially, a picture book with sound (music) is a popular style for children and adults. Typical implemen- tations of this kind of book are: • Open a page, then press a corresponding button to play a sound. • Open a page, then a sensor detects which page is opened and plays a sound automatically. In the first case, the user has to do double action, and these two actions are not continuous. In the latter case, the user doesn’t have to do additional actions, but the user is inactive (i.e. just wait a moment to hear a sound). To create storybooks that a user can actively engage in, we have developed LIFT-THE-FLAP, a toolkit to create lift-the- flap books with capacitive sensing switches and actuators. By embedding thin capacitive sensing switches into tabs, the user’s action to move an object will be naturally associated with corresponding feedback (e.g. sound, light, rotation). Figure 1 is a storybook example. When a user pinches a tab to move an object, a corresponding sound is played until the user releases the tab. Figure 1: An example created with the LIFT-THE-FLAP toolkit: “The Rainy Day” RELATED WORKS Various ways to link information to ordinary papers have been proposed[1][5]. Ultra Magic Key uses printed key- shaped symbols to identity pages[6]. PaperIcons uses printed 2D bar codes at the corner of each page to identify the page[3]. In these systems, computer vision with camera is used. For flexibility to handle a wide variety of input meth- ods (e.g. a 2D bar code, fingers and so on), computer vision systems have advantages. Siio et al. has proposed Active Book as an application of FieldMouse[4]. FieldMouse uses a barcode reader and a me- chanical mouse. At first, the user detects an ID on a paper by using the barcode reader, then drags it from the ID using the mouse. Compared to computer vision systems, FieldMouse approach is inexpensive and easy to calibrate, but a special input device is required. Compared to these approaches, LIFT-THE-FLAP method is easy to learn, and easy to use. Since natural actions of the user to operate contents in a lift-the-flap book are associated with media playback, the user is not aware of sensors. IMPLEMENTATION A toolkit consists of the following components: A gainer I/O module, a breadboard with resistors, electrodes for capaci- tive sensing, optional photo reflection sensors to detect which page is opened, optional actuators (e.g. a small electric mo- UIST 2006 Adjunct Proceedings: Demonstrations 61