Create simple Digital Stories for your classroom students

ZooBurst provide a fun new way for students and the educational technology community to create digital stories. With ZooBurst you can also create interactive 3D pop-up books of your digital stories. Sounds strange, right? Lets find out more details in this article.

 

ZooBurst is a web based digital storytelling tool that let anyone easily create digital stories. In addition, a nifty feature called Augmented reality is available with the tool that enable you to view book in the palm of your hand through the computer’s webcam. Good thing is that you don’t need any 3D glasses to view books in Augment reality mode. People can also share books on their websites by embedding code, provided by this online tool same as we share videos from YouTube.

ZooBurst is the project created by Craig Kapp, a graduate student at the Interactive Tele-communications Program (ITP) at New York University.

Zooburst provide you really nice interface with handy features that allow you to change the page, click on characters to see dialogue, or tilt the paper in any direction to view the story from a different angle.

How to use Zooburst to create Digital stories as well as 3-D popup books and Augmented reality mode activation

ZooBurst provide integrated development environment that allow you to easily construct rich 3D scenes using drag and drop interface.Several options are available that allow you to customize items within a book. People can choose items/icons from a huge library of clip art, insert backgrounds, change color, change size of items, type up dialogue, set degree to which items pop out from the screen and then watch their stories in an 3d interface.

To get started, you need apply for an “alpha account” use this form for registration. After your application gets accepted, login to your account and create digital stories using variety of tools available there.

To activate Augmented reality mode on any ZooBurst book, you just require few things which includes standard web browsers, Adobe Flash plug-in, webcam and a special standard size printout (a black ZB box symbol printed on a regular sheet of paper. Get ZooBurst symbol from here) that allows you to view your 3-D pop-up book on your hand, zooming out from the piece of paper.

Open a book and click on the ‘Webcam Mode’ button. When prompted, click the ‘Allow’ button to let ZooBurst access your webcam.Hold the symbol up to your webcam and your story book come to life in 3-D. A button available on Zooburst  that can take a screenshot of user holding 3D popup book (Thanks Kevin) and email it as JPEG .

Online ZooBurst Book Library and Device compatibility issue

However, we still not discover any library option publically available on the website. But, there is a collection of books available on the website which you can browse directly, using the ‘search’ box that appears on the top-right side of every ZooBurst page on their website.

These popup books do not support devices such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone because this tool require Adobe Flash player plug-in. We are looking forward  for the new features and updates from ZooBurst. First image courtesy of Austin Carr.