It’s generally agreed upon that eBook reading on a digital reader isn’t quite up to scratch when compared to the real thing. Yes you can annotate, highlight and search for words with ease, but there’s no tactile thumbing, leafing or folding of pages that makes paper so delectable to read on.
Pioneers in the field such as the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence are however endeavouring to improve the experience, basing gesture control multi-touch input on common idiosyncrasies readers of physical books engage with when casually embracing their book of choice.
A video of KAIST’s work can be seen below. Aside from looking slick, the gestures also empower some intuitive browsing such as flicking across multiple pages with one hand bookmarking your current page and peeking a few pages either way of your current location, not to mention fast swiping and page number annotation.
With iBooks 2 and iPads making their way to schools, one shouldn’t underestimate the gravity of research like this. There’s every chance that such gestures will become the way tomorrow’s tech-focused kids peruse through the pages of course-texts more naturally than were they given an actual book to read.
While the API (Application Programming Interface) would suggest that this specific example won’t make it’s way into the App Store, our guess is that something along these lines will be making its way onto tablets pretty soon.
Source: Mac Rumors
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