The Lonely Planet PAPR Tokyo! project was developed during Phil van Allen’s Interaction Design 1 class for the Media Design Program at Art College Center of Design.

In this project, we addressed the problems readers face in the popular Lonely Planet series travel books. Lonely Planet guidebooks hold a vast amount of information, spanning across disparate topics over several hundred, sometimes even a thousand pages. We decided to look at the future of this popular guidebook series, and to see how a transition from physical to a high-resolution, full color electronic paper with touch and gesture recognition capabilities would affect the format and user interaction with the book and its content. This epaper, or PAPR, as we named it, coupled with the PAPR Tokyo! interface, offer the reader the ability to interact with the body of text, and to really make it his own.