Augmented Reality Pop-Up Book

Helen Papagiannis is a designer specializing in augmented reality.  She’s spoken at TEDx about the creative side of AR, which was highlighted as one of the top talks about AR and the gamification of life and worked for the internationally renown Bruce Mau Design.

And now she’s putting out a Augmented Reality Pop-Up Book for mobile devices using image recognition.  The book can be enjoyed alone or with the enhanced graphics using an iPad2 or iPhone4.

What I like most about her Pop-Up book is that Helen gets what AR is all about.  Or really what it is–a medium to transfer information.  If you handed the book and the iPad2 to a child and told them to play around, you wouldn’t have to worry that they wouldn’t “get” augmented reality.  They wouldn’t require an explanation or that “AR is that thing on the first down line in football.”  They would just play.

Helen is a natural storyteller, as seen by TEDx talk.  Even her twitter account is called @ARStories (I wish I’d thought of that one.)  She gets that AR is all about telling stories in new and interesting ways, whatever the level of technology.  She used the tools at hand, in this case the AR browser Junaio, to make her Pop-Up book.

And as the technology advances, so too will the level of stories being told.  I expect from this simple Pop-Up book, that we’ll be seeing more of Helen for quite some time.

You can find Helen at her blog – Augmented Stories.