Augmenting paper to enhance community information sharing

Paper is traditionally considered as a major gap between the physical and electronic worlds, especially after the many attempts that have failed to attain a completely digital world. Paper based artifacts have many affordances that people want to continue to exploit. The work presented here is part of the Campiello project. It describes how the existing paper artifacts in use during the visits to cultural and tourist towns as well as artefacts used for local communities can be extended in order to become a bridge instead of a barrier to the richness of the digital world. After an introduction that describes the Campiello system and the principles that have driven its functionality, a complete design and the current implementation is presented. Finally, we discuss Paper Interface issues and survey the existing approaches in the field.