Interactive rich reading: enhanced book reading experience with a conversational agent

In this work, we introduce Interactive Rich Reading, a new enhanced book experience designed to run on smartphones and a tablet device. Interactive Rich Reading is characterized by a video-based conversational agent that asks questions or makes comments about the current page and is specifically designed to promote engagement with the contents of children's books. We use video compositing techniques to overlay the conversational agent directly over the book contents, creating a magical experience for children by bringing the book to life. We describe technical issues related to enabling this experience on mobile platforms for easier adoption of this technique by other researchers and practitioners.