Immersive Authoring

Audience

Our audience really is anyone that likes to or just cooks in general. This will be another cookbook with beautiful looking food and recipes to add to your collection. There is a little laugh here and there throughout this, so anyone with a pulse should LOVE this book.

Objectives

Our objective in this project is to create a digital cookbook using the program iBooks Author. We will begin by gathering all of the recipes and additional information so that we have all of the “media” to create this book. Things we will need to create this book are: Recipes, images, nutritional facts, and some good looking fonts. This will all be compiled for a quick yet interactive experience to assist the user in creating a good tasting, good looking meal. We have concluded that we will use several of the interactive options available in iBooks Author to enhance the experience. We have also chosen to create our own animations through Hype to add to the book. All of this will be combined to create an attractive, easy to use, helpful application (or iBook).

Cookbook Assets

Just by looking at this book one might think that there are just a few pretty pictures with some text slapped on it and some simple animations, but a lot of work went into making this book happen.

It started with a few simple wireframes. This was done just to get us going in a certain direction.

The next step was finding images to go with the recipes. The hardest part was finding images that were large enough. What ended up happening was that the images needed to be taken into photoshop to extend what was in the image so that the book would have seamless images from page to page. (Image 2) shows a few before and after images.

After adjusting the images and making them seamless, it was just a matter of bringing them into iBook Author and putting text over them. The original idea was to have everything be images with one part that would jump you to a Hype widget. This widget would allow you to see the final product with the nutritional information animating in and out.

This felt a little out of place with the current design and the idea morphed into what it is in the final book. All of the recipe pages are actually full page Hype widgets that allow you turn on or off the nutrition information, the cook and prep times and the comments section.

Original it was assumed that the full page widget could have other widgets sitting on top of it. It looked great in iBook Author but when it was tested, everything disappeared except for the scrolling sidebar. The scrolling sidebar background also disappeared. It was odd. Because of that it was necessary to make the whole page a Hype widget with multiple functions.

Testing

The book was tested throughout the creation process. That way it was quickly determined where elements would likely fail and they were corrected before getting to far into the book.

Conclusion

Dunder Mifflin Delights is by far (probably, most likely) the greatest interactive cookbook anywhere!! It turned out just like we thought it would.
Personally it wasn’t that difficult a task to work the software and get it to do what we needed it to do. Having worked with this before and knowing some of the quirks made it less of a headache to make this cookbook.

Testing throughout the whole creation of the book also helped to limit the frustrations. It was a little time consuming to photoshop the backgrounds that we needed and learning (sort of) Hype was a challenge. Hype seems so cool and I can’t wait to learn it some more. Once we got the Hype element figured out, it was just a matter of replacing files to create a widget for each recipe page.

Overall we are pleased with how it turned out. The photos are beautiful and it’s super easy to navigate through this book. The video elements also add a little bit of fun and humor to the book.

If there was more time it would have been nice to add more recipes to create a full on cookbook with breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, drinks.

Chelsa (MacKay) Anderton is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to Immersive Authoring in the DGM 2260 course and is a representation of the skills learned.