What is Paranga?


Recently e-books have grown in popularity, but we think they lost their physical features that real books have (shape of books, paper-like textures, sensations of flipping pages, etc.). So we started this project to recreate them even with e-books.

In addition, the current e-books only show original contents like texts, figures, etc. This means that the e-books do not employ any advantage that all contents can be made interactive by a computer inside of e-reader device. So we would like to create new type of e-books that fully utilize functions of device.


Paranga provides people with page-turning experience by hitting real pieces of papers on their thumb, and animating the contents in the LCD display at the same time. This is done by a simple mechanism with a motor, bend sensor, rotary encoder, and microprocessor. The rotational speed of the motor with pieces of paper is controlled according to two measured values; (1) bending degree and (2) pressure by user's thumb.

  1. Bending degree is simply measured by a bend sensor. When a user increase the degree of bending, the motor rotates faster and gives him the flipping sensation.
  2. When a user pushes the roller by his thumb, the rotary encoder detects reduction of its rotational speed, and the motor gets faster against the pressure to keep the rotational speed as a constant.
#By the way, a user can stop the rotation with a high pressure to the rotary like a real book.


The most advantage of Paranga is to provide users with a book-reading experience that is quite close to that of real books. This experience includes not only the tactile feedbacks to user's thumb but also the way of page turning - bending the book. In addition, Paranga offers users to flip pages infinitely, which enables flipping many numbers of pages in order rapidly. This can be used, for example, when users look over a whole book to find a certain page.

And regarding the interactive e-books, we made several animations whose story changes according to the speed of page turning. We believe it is a new way of enjoying e-books that story changes depending on users' behaviors.


Paranga already has the potential for children's toys. In addition, we would like to develop an attachment device for tablets like iPad. To achieve this, the whole device will be right-hand side of Paranga with a microprocessor. One of our ideas is that the attachment connects to a tablet using Bluetooth, and it makes page-turning possible by sending pulse of the rotary encoder to the tablet. This mechanism would make the cost much cheaper.

We would be very happy if a company had an interests on being a partner to develop a commercial version.