After the experiments with the “books that can’t be printed“, Google is not stopping in its rampage in the book world: this time the news are about two patents filed by the company that put into play augmented reality.

These two patents, originally filed in January 2015 at USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), are about technologies related to the books’ world.

The first one is about an “interactive book“, described inside the document also as a “storytelling device“. As we can read in the abstract, the device includes electronic components as light sources, speakers, a video projector or a display, and it is configured to establish a connection with an interactive book, providing story enhancement effects that are correlated to the story.
Basically, the project is about volumes with movement and pressure sensors, coupled with a round shaped device that plugs inside the spine of the book, throwing up AR-type images and the appropriate audio to recreate the setting of the story.

The second patent is about a “Media enhanced pop-up book“, a revisitation of the classic pop-up book with a sparkle of technology. Reading the filed document, we understand that Google thought to a physical book composed of pop-up pages and some content on the display of a device. For every page, the book will have a second page that will vertically open, plus some additional images appearing on the mobile device. In this kind of book, augmented reality is not as advanced as in the micro-projector case.

Of course, we are ttalking about patents,  so it’s not sure that they will become products available on the market. However these ideas, if added to the experiments about the books that can’t be printed, surely say a lot about Google’s fields of interest.