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.
