Through special glasses looking at a projected wall of computerized video, viewers explore whole three-dimensional worlds created by artists. But the HITL project is quite different. A Magic Book looks like a regular storybook with colorful pages and simple text. This is called augmented virtual reality. Unlike immersive virtual reality such as Spirited Ruins, where viewers can fly into the virtual scene and freely explore a totally VR environment, this process brings the virtual into the real, mixing them and making them interact.
Several viewers can gather around a single Magic Book and experience it together.
Both the worldwide phenomena of Flash and the VR laboratories that created Spirited Ruins and the Magic Book represent a deep connected relationship between the engineers and artists who develop new technologies together. The traditional explanation is that innovators invent new technologies that artists later come to use, and by doing so, the artists humanize the technology, making it friendlier and more accessible to the general public. This explanation treats the relationship as a one-way street, where artists are just given new technologies with which to make art. True mutual benefits occur when creativity and innovation work together from inception. The list of technological innovations actually created by artists while on their way to something else is astounding.