Possibility of Reading Notes as Media to Enrich Communications Between Reader and Book

Abstract

Reading gives readers intellectual stimuli, elicits their imagination and creativity, and expands their inner world. If reading has such importance, in Japan, many people don’t understand the importance of reading. In this research, we introduce the concept to postulate that reading is communication between a reader and a book, even though a book is not reactive but non-reactive entity. An idea is to change a book into a reactive entity, and to achieve interactions between a reader and a book. Especially, we introduce a mechanism to feedback a reading note as response from a book to a reader’s gaze information that the reader generates during reading as stimulus to the book. A reading note is a record that a reader makes about a book, based on the reader’s intention and interest. Reader’s gaze information generated during reading shows his/her mind about the book. Thus, we regard that a reading note is useful as response from a book, and employ reader’s gaze information is useful stimuli to a book. The technological goal of this study is to build an automatic reading notes creation system that automatically generate reading notes based on gaze information that a reader naturally generates during reading. For that goal, we conducted experiments to measure a subject’s gaze coordinate data, and to verify whether we could identify eye movements for specific four reading patterns through the analysis of the acquired data. As the result, we have confirmed it possible to identify a reader’s reading patterns from the change of gaze information.