Creating Interactive Books/Manuals in Unity?

Questions & Answers
1

I'm looking to create short interactive books or training manuals that include features like simulations, mini-games, videos, drawing tools, etc. I have investigated the typical avenues like Flash & HTML5 (and built prototypes), but a cross-platform game engine like Unity is very appealing to me since it does not have anywhere near the limitations of the other alternatives (and the feature set of Unity, in particular, is mouth-watering).

What would be the best way of taking the content of a book (in some digital format) and building an interactive version of it? To be more precise: Would simply taking the book and exporting the pages as PNGs (or another image format) then mapping them to a plane be the best way of getting that content into Unity? Are there other alternatives?

The books are really graphics-heavy, not text-heavy, and layout/deign of the pages is important - so I would imagine that doing this would be done in a similar fashion to putting a large world map into a game.

I'd just like to know the best method to get that book content into Unity - ideally without having to remake the content of the book in another format, but I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

2

Well the best way to maintain both the quality and the integrity of the book would be painstakingly troublesome...that is, replacing all the text and images on the page with GUI commands.

Alternatively, if you exported all of the pages to a PNG format, you could use them as GUITextures provided the resolution of your build was high enough that it would be readable. Mapping them to planes is not really recommended because of the troubles you will run into with 3d rendering such as lighting and mip-mapping...it's much more reliable to use GUITextures for a direct import on the book pages.

For many pages, I'd recommend having some kind of naming convention that included page numbers, then placing them in a folder named "Resources". This will allow you to load and unload the images dynamically from memory using Resources.Load, Resources.LoadAll, and Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets.

Ultimately, Unity is probably a little overkill for something like an interactive book, but I definitely encourage creative uses of the engine as it is very powerful and multifaceted.