Using Multisensory Content to Impact the Quality of Experience of Reading Digital Books

AbstractMultisensorial books enrich a story with either traditional multimedia content or sensorial effects. The main idea is to increase children’s interest in reading by enhancing their QoE while reading. Studies on enriched and/or augmented e-books also propose synchronizing additional content with text. However, they usually focus on audio, vídeo, images, or haptic feedback. In this work, we present MBook, a tool for presenting multisensorial books. It decouples the book’s textual content from the additional content, as well as its synchronization, and rendering. Thus, a change in the additional content or its synchronization does not require changes to the book’s content. To enable fine-grained synchronization, MBook captures the reading position using an eye-tracker. Experimental results with students within the 13- to 19-year-old age group point to MBook being able to provide good usability.