I remember pop-up books all too well. Hunched over in bed, every page a new spectacle of wonder. Then, as with all nice things, it’d find itself getting ruined somehow. A page’s embellishment bent beyond recognition. Another disappointment to be rooted in a kids’ psyche. Peronio, a virtual pop-up book, seeks to remedy that blunder: by implementing virtual and augmented realities for all the imaginative kids out there.
Peronio follows the adventures of a boy trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up, a familiar struggle—both in childhood and well outside of it. (Heck, I’m still figuring it out.) Peronio, the titular boy, is full of wild career ideas like being a dentist for dragons or a spaceship engineer, plus whatever else comes to his mind. As the player flips through the virtual pages of little Peronio’s experiments, they see his dreams come to life by literally popping off the page, and are able to interact with the scenes to help cement the boy’s imaginative ideas—which, honestly, is more than a typical pop-up book is able to offer.
Peronio’s dreams come to life by literally popping off the page
For VR and AR, Peronio has tried to create a seamless approach to both. Where the two are separate experiences, but work in nearly the same way. For VR, either with Google Cardboard or the Gear VR, players can flip through pages in a book, and watch them pop up and come to life before their very eyes, all remaining virtual. For the AR portion, players can either pull up Peronio’s pages onto their computer screen or print them out, and players can then poke and prod the digital objects that arise from it—think, like the Nintendo 3DS’ long-forgotten AR cards.
Peronio’s been released on the App Store and Google Play in the past, but its Gear VR version is brand new. You can watch the trailer for the pop-up book below to get a glimpse of how everything works.
