Bibli-o-mat

Bibli-o-mat Book Browser

Bibli-o-mat lets you pull any public domain book from Archive.org's Open Library and handle them in life-size 3-dimensional form.  You can read them surrounded by the Library of Congress Reading Room or other environments of you choose.  This is a work in progress.  Your support will allow us to add the many planned features that we have on our agenda.  Feature requests and bug reports welcome!

Search for public domain books in by Subject, Title or Author and select which collections to search through. 

Read a 3D representation of the book produced to the scale you designate. 

Adjusting the anti-aliasing can compensate for artifacts caused by limited headset resolution.

Books will be affected by gravity when near the table, but if carried away from the table will float in space. 

Grabbing a book with your right hand will make it the active book for page turning.

In VR, the right thumb stick will turn the pages of the active book. 

The left thumb stick will move you about the room. 

The A button will toggle the visibility of the search panel. 

The right hand has a pointer for interacting with the search panel.

Because of memory limitations, the books only retain the several pages before and after the one you are reading. 

Page turning may be slow if the next pages are still downloading. 

Opening too many books in one session can cause the app to crash. 

To prevent this, only fours books at a time is allowed - the first books you loaded will be destroyed if you load more.

Use Settings to change environment and anti-alias level of book pages.  A higher level of anti-aliasing uses less memory but can look more blurry.

This experience is designed for VR and the Meta Quest 2.

KNOWN ISSUES:

- Memory issues limits number of books open at once to one.

- Scope of books limited by what is in the public domain.

- Resolution of headset still limits ease of reading - books need to be held unnaturally close for legibility

- Turning pages is slow due to internet speeds of loading on demand