Magic cube conjures virtual reality kid's tales

A novel interactive way to relate children's stories has been developed by researchers in Singapore. The Magic Story Cube uses augmented reality technology, in which computer graphics are superimposed on the real world, to overlay an animated version of a story on top of a child's traditional "magic cube".

A standard magic cube is made up of a handful of smaller wooden or plastic cubes connected at various edges. These can be unfolded in a variety of ways to reveal a sequence of puzzles or different pictures. But now Adrian Cheok and Zhou ZhiYing at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have updated the children's toy.

Their first attempt is to tell the Old Testament story of Noah's ark. To watch the story unfold, the user wears a virtual reality headset with a small camera attached to the front. Both the camera and headset are plugged into a computer running software that recognises numbers printed on different cubes.

When the user unfolds the cube to reveal a particular numbered square, the computer uses this as its cue to run a segment of audio and animated three-dimensional video, which tells part of the Noah's ark story.

Arrows printed on the cubes tell the user how to unfold the cube to move to the next scene. Each numbered square that appears then pulls up the relevant video and audio clip. The size of the numbered square is used to determine the exact position of the cube in space relative to the camera so the system knows where to project the images.

Physical creatures

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In early lab tests, users said they enjoyed the Magic Story Cube more than a picture book. "You need to take account of the fact that people are physical creatures, and these cubes are a very tangible, direct way of interacting with information," Cheok says.

In addition to stories, the NUS team is planning educational cubes that involve puzzle solving, or perhaps something to educate a child about the laws of physics or chemistry.

The approach represents a new people-friendly way of displaying the information generated by interacting with computers, says Yusuf Pisan, of the University of Technology in Sydney, who this month chaired a workshop where the cubetechnology was revealed.

"Current head-mounted displays are still bulky but they won't be like that for long. The magic cube is a prototype of how we can manipulate information and interact with people and computers in a new way," he says.

Emma Young, Sydney

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