Augmented interaction with physical books in an Ambient Intelligence learning environment

This paper presents an augmented reality environment for students' improved learning, which is based on unobtrusive monitoring of the natural reading and writing process. This environment, named SESIL, is able to perform recognition of book pages and of specific elements of interest within a page, as well as to perceive interaction with actual books and pens/pencils, without requiring any special interaction device. As a result, unobtrusive, context - aware student assistance can be provided. In this way, the learning process can be enhanced during reading with the retrieval and presentation of related material and, during writing, by the provision of assistance to accomplish writing tasks whenever appropriate. The SESIL environment is evaluated in terms of robustness, accuracy and usability.