Judge a Book by Its Contents: How AR Will Transform Print While Preserving Tradition

Currently grappling with the ever-shortening attention span of our chronically-online youth, publishing houses could potentially find themselves in a precarious position against digital media. Introducing Artivive on already-existing print learning materials and books to visualise and animate complex concepts can significantly enhance engagement and retention for a fraction of the cost of digitalisation, which would be detrimental to both publishing houses and students, who were direly affected by screen fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To digitalise, or not to digitalise… that is the question. Artivive offers all the benefits of interactive learning with technology and none of its side effects. 

If there’s one childhood feeling we all independently experienced before the internet, it was our excitement when teachers rolled the TV into the classroom. Imagine you’re a student again (yikes!) and doing your solid geometry homework: you’re trying your best to imagine a 3D figure from a handful of coordinates, vectors and numbers. Think how much easier maths could have been if only you could have scanned the figure and seen it in 3D from all angles. If seeing a heart diagram beat in a biology notebook doesn’t keep kids in school, what will?

According to a review by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, using visual aids, in this case AR, can deepen students' understanding, increase engagement and improve learning outcomes by making abstract or complex concepts more tangible and relatable. This effect is especially beneficial in scientific education, where understanding spatial and functional relationships—such as how organs move or work together—can be challenging through traditional methods alone, and destructive through prolonged screen exposure. 

AR enhances users' understanding of space and time by seamlessly integrating physical and virtual worlds, fostering a richer perspective on their interplay (Dunleavy & Dede, 2014; Sin & Zaman, 2010). This integration helps students grasp abstract concepts and uncover relationships between them, as noted by Cheng and Tsai (2014). Building on this, Klopfer and Squire (2008) emphasized how AR creates unique opportunities for students to explore complex phenomena, often inaccessible in real-world scenarios, thereby bridging theoretical knowledge with interactive, experiential learning.

Artivive is no stranger to publishing houses or book animation artists. Thanks to trailblazing projects like the collaboration with Michaela Konrad on her magazine Tomorrow, Artivive opened a brand new path for print books to offer the best of print and e-books. Readers can peruse Tomorrow and, at their leisure, scan its pages with the Artivive app and interact with the drawings. Inspired by fantasists like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Phillip K. Dick, she creates a past vision of current events. The video work WILL THIS BE?, which is presented together with the hand-printed cover images, playfully addresses past prognoses regarding our present time. Konrad’s Tomorrow made it to the ORF, showing a growing interest and need for AR-enhanced books. 

With the Artivive App people can virtually immerse themselves into any book while still enjoying the texture of its printed pages, going over previously-read pages and putting that book on display. Simultaneously, interactive technologies like AR not only engage digitally-native students but also facilitate a richer learning experience that enhances both comprehension and retention of complex scientific concepts.

We are all too aware of the sudden evolution of learning spaces: what was once a pile of chairs, desks and a chalkboard is quickly assimilating into our technological landscape, as it should. After all, education is all about preparing students for the “real world”. With Artivive, students will enjoy a learning experience like no other: no screen fatigue, seeing abstract concepts materialise from thin air, interacting with materials on their own time, incorporating ground-breaking technological advances into their curriculum and learning much-needed digital skills. 

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