Turning Pages of 3D Electronic Books

Taking the form of physical books, virtual 3D books can be used as basic components of e-book systems, information workspaces, and digital libraries. This paper describes the page turning design of 3Book, a 3D book system that we recently developed. Our design aims to find a sensible balance among important factors such as visual realism, readability, interactivity, and scalability. To convey the impression of reading or viewing an actual physical book, we model all the faces of the book and synchronize the movements of various portions of the book during page turning. Our design delivers a seamless transition between two states of the book (i.e., when it is lying still and when it is turning pages). In addition, we deform the turning pages around an imaginary cone of changing sizes to produce realistically-looking curved pages.