J.K. Rowling has updated her website with information about the upcoming Wonderbook: Book of Spells for Playstation.

In the world of Harry Potter, the Book of Spells is 200 years old and is written by Miranda Goshawk. This powerful spell book is kept in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library. As a student at Hogwarts, chapter by chapter you will be able to read about and practise a variety of spells, picking up valuable experiences and lessons along the way.

Wonderbook is a new peripheral for PlayStation®3. Using the latest augmented reality technology, Wonderbook puts a physical book in your hands and will support a magical new range of games and reading experiences for the whole family to enjoy.

In addition, Andy House of Sony spoke about how they came up with the idea and how excited J.K. Rowling is about the collaboration.

Sony’s London Studio has been innovative in the past with peripherals like the EyeToy camera, what led to the Wonderbook? I think it was a natural progression, initially from EyeToy and then they built up some considerable strength in Augmented Reality – you may remember EyePet and Invizimals, which were really nice kid-friendly franchises that took full advantage of AR technology, and then it was a natural step to say: what if we combined that idea with some form of physical peripheral? And the intuition was that the most natural interface that we all know is a book.

At the same time, we had the partnership with [J.K. Rowling’s] Pottermore [online property], something I was involved with personally. It was a form of serendipity, we built a good relationship with Michael Denny who runs Sony’s UK studios and was looking for ways to extend the partnership and he said they’d got this rather nascent idea around books and reading and the use of AR.

The next step was to bring it to the attention of J.K. Rowling and she became very enthusiastic. She was marvellous in guiding us in a certain direction. Her view was that text is important and and that informed Book of Spells, we wanted to have this really interesting interaction with text itself so you’re getting children to enjoy the reading experience and getting something magical out of that.

You don’t think consumers will be put off by having to buy the book, perhaps a Move controller and Eye camera? The advantage of bringing this to market now is we have fairly mature technology in terms of the Playstation and controllers, we’re pretty confident we’ll be able to construct some competitive and compelling price points around it. The marketing challenge for us is to convey to people that this is a one-off investment you need to make, but once you’ve done that, there’s an opportunity to refresh it with other content at very affordable prices.  If we’re able to bring bona fide educational content to them, then people will find that compelling.