Nice! Many, many years ago, when Shelfie was shutting down, I was imagining we might want VR bookshelves one day, and I convinced Brewster to store Sheflie's spine and cover images over at the archive. Might be worth reaching out to see if they still have them. Spine images are a little hard to get; they're not part of the Amazon API, for instance.
Thanks, yeah I currently just hardcode the image URL from whatever cover I find online. Maybe you had an old version cached or the image just failed to load for whatever reason.
I need to update my bookshelf really, I haven't bothered to do so since 2023!
Very cool! I love the animation. I worked on a similar interface inspired a while back for Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/explore . You have to go to "Settings > Book style > 3d-spine" to enable the effect
I do not own many leather-bound books, nor does my apartment smell of rich mahogony, but this gave me a wonderful idea for visualising what my many ebooks might look like through an AR or VR virtual library experience.
Open library has covers/metadata; alas no spines! I built an interface similar to this for Open Library using library classifications for sorting: https://openlibrary.org/explore
Most ebooks have embedded cover images that Calibre will automatically extract. I know of https://isbndb.com/ which has covers of some resolution but I've never tried using them before.
Looks great. Though while I love me some skeuomorphism, it goes too far when it is plainly detrimental to usability, which it is here - I have to crane my neck sideways to read the titles. In a virtual world, the books could be stacked horizontally so that the titles are readable with user head upright.
I've wanted something like this so that I can have a custom bookshelf behind me in teams calls. I was tempted to make one but had no clue where to find book spine artwork.
Digitizing spines is a lot less labor intensive than bookscanning; getting photos of spines is basically just taking photos of shelves, so maybe just go to the library and spend about 5 minutes taking photos.
I read almost exclusively on Kindle, and one of the downsides of an e-book library is that it's not really browsable by your friends and family when they come over. I've long envisioned a movie poster-sized touch screen that shows my library almost exactly like this, so people can touch it, scroll through my library, and interact with books (ie, animate it sliding out and displaying the cover + description). When it's not interacted with, it just looks like a painting on the wall.
I have zero idea how to pull this off, but I'd love to do it, and this visualization of the shelf is exactly what I had in mind!
I've wanted to build something similar to this for music. Some virtual environment where you can organize your albums on shelves and play them on a turntable.
You could even extend this so you have to walk to a store to buy new albums etc.
I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but a year ago, I saw a oculus quest VR environment which re-created a standard 90s era bedroom. The user could then add a text file containing a bunch of YouTube URLs and all the associated YouTube videos got represented as physical VHS tapes that you had to put into the actual VCR in order to play them on the TV in the room.
Sansar had that years ago. They re-created Aech's basement from Ready Player One, with walls of tapes in various formats.[1] This could be explored in VR. It was good for a few minutes of amusement, but not useful. They didn't have the rights to let you play much of the collection.
There's a business in Second Life which has virtual video stores, where all the videos are in boxes on shelves. You can walk around, look at the titles, rent them, and play them on your
virtual TV. Have friends over to your virtual house and you all see the same thing.
They have some rights deal which lets them do this for a few hundred videos.
The selection is comparable to what Redbox stocked.
This was big during COVID lockdown; not so much now.
Great. Back when quirky.com was a product idea site, I proposed a piece of furniture that would be a bookshelf for ebooks (large e-ink screen cabinet).
Went to comments here exactly for this. I was delighted to see one of my favorite authors front-and-center as an incidental detail of an otherwise unrelated tech. demo.
Right now books are sorted by author name (eek, I think first name--calibre has an author_sort field I should use), then series name, then series index.
It was a fad to abandon this for flat design, but it has been shown since then, that many designers are highly incompetent when it comes to useability - and this is great useability as in - the interface explains itself.
Which 2d- flatland designs usually do not (some do, with animations etc.) . Thus the fad is in full retreat and useability is king again.
3D graphics animation has transformed the way we experience visual storytelling, adding depth and realism to everything from films to video games. Its ability to create lifelike environments and characters is revolutionizing industries, offering endless creative possibilities and immersive experiences.
https://kreativehive.ca/graphics-design/
