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Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

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Re: Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

#11

Post by vunderba »

quirino wrote: post #5

Very cool! 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.

Re: Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

#15

Post by vessenes »

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.

Re: Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

#16

Post by vessenes »

randomcatuser wrote: post #2

This is awesome! If we want to extend this to be a whole virtual library, are there datasets that people know about for book covers? One thing that would be cool is book spine datasets!

Good q! Check my other comment here about spine images.

Re: Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

#20

Post by Jemaclus »

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!

Amazing job. I'm very impressed!

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