Abstract
Paper has been repeatedly recognised as an important medium for exchanging, editing and managing documents throughout the document life-cycle. Despite their static nature, paper documents still represent one of the preferred way of handling information in different situations, such as on the move or in collaboration. In order to overcome the limitations of paper and exploit the advantages of digital interfaces, new technologies for interactive paper have been introduced in recent years. Technologies such as the Anoto Digital Pen and Paper enable users to access digital information through interactions with printed copies. Links to digital content and services are defined on paper and activated when users interact with the paper sheet by means of a digital pen.
Various research projects have investigated how to best enable interactions with digital services through interactive paper interfaces. The developed prototypes showed the potential of the available technologies for bridging the paper-digital divide and how paper and digital documents can be effectively interwoven. However, most of the existing approaches concentrate on enriching paper-digital interactions only, very often forgetting to take into account the process of producing interactive paper documents and the effective management of information across the two interfaces. The current lack of support for generating rich interactive paper documents leads to a separation of paper-digital documents in two detached entities, that can hardly be mapped again as the paper and digital instances of the same document.
To further enrich the information exchange across the paper-digital boundary and to support a better management of paper-digital documents, we introduce a set of general concepts and models for supporting a novel information-centric infrastructure for publishing interactive paper documents. Our approach supports the automatic and semi-automatic generation of paper-based links to digital information, by intercepting the publishing process of a digital document and applying document analysis techniques to the underlying document models. Furthermore,the presented solution supports the large-scale production of interactive paper documents with the aid of a Web Content Management System (CMS), thus enabling the development of innovative paper-based Web applications. Finally, our approach also enables the management of information that continuously moves between the digital and the paper worlds, allowing users to work with the medium that is best suited to a particular task. The introduction of a novel document model for storing mixed physical-digital information fully supports the bidirectional mapping of paper and digital interactions at different granularity levels.
We implemented our publishing framework on top of the existing infrastructure for interactive paper offered by the iPaper/iServer system. However, the approach and the architecture are general enough to be applied to other toolkits as well. Our framework supports the management of different document models and the coupling with a range of authoring tools, through the definition of a flexible plug-in interface. Furthermore, the developed publishing framework also provides extended support for generating and printing Anoto-based interactive paper documents.
The generality, flexibility and extensibility of the presented infrastructure enable the rapid development of plug-ins for different kinds of documents, services and interactions, thus supporting the rapid prototyping of innovative rich interactive paper applications. Our approach has been validated through the development of a range of applications and prototypes enabling rich interactions across the paper-digital divide. These prototypes have been presented and discussed with academic and industrial partners from computer science, printed and organic electronics, paper engineering, social science, the publishing industry and interaction design.
We believe that the provision of a central infrastructure for publishing interactive paper documents and the handling of the underlying information in a data-centric way, as enabled by our approach, are the key to support the seamless transition between the digital and paper worlds. Our innovative publishing infrastructure supports a full interplay between paper and digital documents, eventually enabling the development of richer interactive paper applications.
