Children’s books are a very high-demand and lucrative industry. Bright, strong, and high-personality visuals combine with inventive and inspiring stories to capture the imaginations of children of all ages and origins. Dr. Seuss may be one of the most prolific authors, with his iconic visual style and hilarious rhymes, but I have strong memories of all kinds of children’s books from when I was younger. Many of them being pop-up books.
Peronio is, according to press release communication, “a game that tells the story of a boy who cannot decide what he wants to be when he grows up.” It tells this story through an innovative combination of technologies. Through the use of augmented reality, it can display holographic images on a table to interact with, you can use it on a tablet simply as a virtual pop-up book, and you can also even check it out in VR with both Google Cardboard and Gear VR versions through your phone’s camera. You get to actually interact with Peronio on the pages with your hands and gaze.
That flexibility is a big reason why the application is so interesting. You can just use the touchscreen of a tablet to see the digital version, or you can lay out an actual piece of physical paper and point your headset or tablet at it to watch it spring to life on the table itself.
Skylanders recently experimented with a similar type of AR implementation with mostly positive results and we will likely see more examples of this going forward. Modern Polaxis is a great example of how similar technology is being use in the comic industry.
The video directly above shows some VR-specific footage of what it looks like inside a virtual reality headset to play Peronio, whereas the video at the top of this article shows footage of the tablet mode, AR mode, and VR modes all together to give you an idea of the differences in presentation. We hope to see more entries in this series from Ovni Studios.
