University of Colorado
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Textbooks come alive with new, interactive AI tool
With just an iPad, students in any classroom across the world could soon reimagine the ordinary diagrams in any physics textbook—transforming these static images into 3D simulations that run, leap or spin across the page. These new, living textbooks are the brainchild of a team of computer scientists led by Ryo Suzuki at CU Boulder.
“Usually, those diagrams are fixed. We have to imagine what happens,” said Suzuki, assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science. “But what if we could take any static diagram from any textbook and make it interactive?”
He and his colleagues recently took home a “best paper” award for their work at the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology this October in Pittsburgh.
The tool relies on a model called Segment Anything from the tech company Meta. It’s a computer visualization tool that allows users to click on a photo to isolate particular objects—a dog, or maybe a face. Similarly, through Augmented Physics, students and teachers select various objects inside a diagram, such as the skier and the ski jump, and assign those objects roles. The AI then applies some basic physics, such as the force of gravity, to make those objects move.