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Designing an infinite digital bookcase

By Aaron Koblin, Data Arts Team and Bill Schilit, Research

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books?

A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online�many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that�s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.

The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.

If you�ve finished your browsing and find a book you want to read, you can click the �Get this book� button on the bottom right of the page, which will send you to that book�s page on books.google.com. Or, you can open the title on your phone or tablet via the QR code that�s in the bottom left corner of the page, using a QR code app like Google Goggles. You can also browse just free books by selecting the �Free Books� subject in the subject viewer.



Bookworms using a modern browser can try the WebGL Bookcase today. We recommend using Google Chrome and a fast computer with a powerful graphics card. Even with new hardware, this interface is experimental and may not work on some machines. For more creative browser experiments, check out Chrome Experiments, a gallery of more than 300 creative projects made by developers and artists from around the world, many utilizing WebGL.


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

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