This project focuses on translating a historical pop-up book into a meaningful virtual experience. The project is in collaboration with the National Library (KB) of the Netherlands, which has a special collection of historical pop-up books. The KB will be moving their collections to an external location, making the books inaccessible. These books are meant to be interacted with; however, this interaction also makes them fragile and rare. Virtual reality offers a solution to this dilemma as it can be used to preserve the original heritage while also making it accessible in an innovative way. The use of VR fits within a wider development of new technologies being implemented in museums and cultural heritage institutions. This project creates a VR experience with a pop-up book called: Tip & Top boven de wolken, created in 1964. The project specifically focuses on two different aspects of the heritage: the materiality and the narrative. It researches how these aspects influence the experience in both physical and virtual pop-up books. It also aims to enhance the aspects using the affordances and interactions possible in VR, with the ultimate goal to integrate the aspects into a coherent experience.

The project starts with a literature review, which selects relevant frameworks for characterizing the materiality and measuring the narrative engagement. It is supported with additional desktop research looking into existing applications of VR/AR for (children’s) books. Two observation studies were conducted focusing on the materiality and the narrative. The first study compares the materiality of physical pop-up books with that of virtual pop-up books. The second study is focused on the narrative engagement and interpretation of the story of the case study book. These insights form the input for the ideation and conceptualization phases. A creative session was hosted to generate ideas for new interactions with the virtual book that integrate materiality and narrative. The interactions and general flow of the virtual book were tested using different storyboards, ranging in fidelity from paper to interactive digital storyboards. A new approach to materiality in VR was created to combine the materiality of the artifact with that of the narrative. The insights of the different concepting rounds were incorporated into a final prototype. The final concept integrated the materiality and the narrative through special interactions called material touchpoints. The final concept was compared to the original book and the interactive storyboards and it met all the design goals.