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.

Helen Papagiannis at TEDx

Helen Papagiannis opens her talk with a question: “Think about how you saw something new for the first time.”  She goes on to relate that to the magic of her augmented reality piece at the Ontario Science Centre and how the first movies invoked the same sense of wonderment.   I agree with her assessment that AR brings a sense of wonder and magic back to technology.  I don’t think I would still be writing about augmented reality two years and three-hundred and fifty posts later if it didn’t hold that sense of wonder for me.

Helen Papagiannis is an artist, designer, and researcher specializing in Augmented Reality (AR). Hailed as being among the top 10 forces currently shaping the AR industry, Papagiannis has been working with AR since 2005 exploring the creative possibilities and theoretical implications for this exciting emerging technology. Recently, Papagiannis’ interactive artworks were featured in an exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre. She is presently completing her Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at York and is a Senior Research Associate at the Augmented Reality Lab (Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts). Prior to her graduate studies, Helen was a member of the internationally renowned Bruce Mau Design studio, where she was project lead on Massive Change: The Future of Global Design.