A prototype Haptic E-Book system to support immersive remote reading in a smart space

Interactive book reading contributes profoundly to the language development in preschool students. Experimental research showed that shared book-reading between adults and children provides children with the opportunity to acquire new vocabulary. Moreover, the time spent reading together provides clear evidence to a child of a parent's love and care [1]. Inspired by such, we propose a remote reading framework in which parents or grandparents remotely participate in remote reading sessions. In this framework, we present an intuitive annotation based approach of hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials. We argue that picture and haptic modality enhanced book reading accelerates language development as students can relate the text with a known visual and tactile references. Hence, in the proposed Haptic E-Book system, by integrating the home entertainment system in the user's reading experience combined with haptic interfaces we examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the user's learning behaviour. The proposed Haptic E-Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to provide haptic emotive signals to the remote story listener in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating image based augmented display in order to pave ways for intimate, shared, and immersive reading experience in the popular ebook platform.