Guinness World Records 2013 goes 3D with augmented reality iOS app

Guinness World Records 2013 goes 3D with augmented reality iOS app.

When I was a kid, comic books cost a quarter, Atari made videogame consoles and personal computers — not just software — and the Guinness Book of World Records was a thick paperback book with a bunch of black and white photos of people with gross, three-foot-long fingernails. A copy of the 2013 edition showed up earlier this week, proving that it’s not just technology that’s changed over those years. Even a large, hardcover book can be updated to make trivia more interesting and incorporate your iOS or Android device to make those paper pages seem a little less static. Don’t worry, not everything has changed — the fingernails are still there (pages 74-75).

Once you pick up a copy of the book itself ($28.95 list price, currently selling on Amazon for $19.11), the next step is to download the free Guinness World Records 2013 Augmented Reality app (also available for Android). There’s also a second, free app, Guinness World Records 2013 The Bonus Chapter, which is an e-book full of supplemental material that’s not included in the dead tree version. The former lets you point a camera-equipped smartphone or tablet at designated pages to see an animation something like this:

 would be enough to spike some interest in kids who are increasingly expectant of such things, but it’s limited to only a half dozen instances through the nearly 300 pages, so I wouldn’t be looking at this as adding an immersive new element to the experience. That being said, my 10-year-olds were on this book pretty quickly, sitting together on the couch and flipping through the glossy pages.


Among the Guinness world records that might be of interest to GeekDad readers (spoiler alert, although if you’re a regular GeekDad reader, the odds are pretty good you already know these):

                                                      GWR2013 Augmented Reality
Largest concentration of observatories: Mauna Kea in Hawaii with 13, including the world’s largest infrared and submillimeter telescopes.
    Furthest distance from Earth traveled by humans: 248,655 miles by the Apollo 13 crew back in 1970.
    Largest collection of Superman memorabilia goes to Herbert Chavez of the Philippines with 1,253 Superman-related items (to go along with his extensive Superman-inspired plastic surgeries).
    The Library of Congress in Washington DC (Serials and Government Publications Division) holds the record for having the largest collection comics in a museum, with over 100,000 issues covering over 5,000 different titles.
    The most successful merchandise franchise in movies? Yeah, it’s Star Wars.

The augmented reality Guinness World Records 2013 is intended as a bridge between old-school paper books and modern content consumption.