You can love your E-book all you want, but users will bring up the fact that its lacks the old-school touch, feel or flicking of the pages. And timely enough, at Interaction 2011, a research group with members from Osaka University has demonstrated the Paranga – a device that can recreate the sensation of turning pages when using an e-book reader. The system uses a built-in sensor to detect how much the book is bent and then recreates the page flipping sensation by rotating a roller which has multiple strips of paper attached. The speed of the rotation is directly affected by how much the book is bent. Although at present the system is not sensitive enough to accurately detect just one page turn at a time, it can turn multiple pages at varying speeds allowing for flip book animations to be displayed.

In today’s day and age of “trying to look real”; it is an interesting innovation, though the pictures of the rather bulky looking Paranga don’t impress us too much. Call me the new-age-kid, but I’m a i-ndex finger girl.


[DigiInfoTV]