British Library Turning the Pages

The British Library holds a copy of every book ever published in the UK, including some of the most priceless literary treasures in existence such as the Codex Sinaiticus (one of the oldest New Testaments). However, not everyone can get to the library in London to read these books.

An amazing new piece of software has been developed to utilise digitised pages of 15 of their most valuable works, "Turning the Pages", a browser-based WPF application that enables you to interact with these books in a virtual environment remotely. You can open a book on your desktop and by clicking on a page, turn it in a 3D environment. (note you will need Adobe Flash Player) you can zoom or pan around each of the pages. (Some secret shortcuts: use the mouse wheel to zoom, shift+drag to rotate the book, ctrl+drag to pan around the scene. Use the settings dialogue to open more than one book simultaneously, and then right-click on the desktop to add new books. Be aware that adding multiple books starts to impose a considerable load on the graphics hardware, so you'll need plenty of video RAM if you want to use this feature.)

Find out more about the application at this site that describes the project in more detail.

Try it out. I think its amazing (make sure you have .NET Framework 3.0 and the application also benefits from a DirectX 9-class graphics card.) my own personal favourite, Sketches by Leonoardo!