Well, it’s here. And it’s a kiwi job too, but nary a piece of number 8 wire on this baby. Seems Dr Mark Billinghurst and his colleagues at New Zealand's Human Interface Technology Laboratory (the HIT Lab) have come up with a means of overlaying 3D images and animations on to books.

Just read that again, lest your techno-weary brain think it’s not a big deal … You look through a hand-held viewer (see right), we would guess much like the old Viewmasters of days of yore. But no actually, for between the lenses is a teeny camera which ‘looks’ at where your eyes are looking, then, as far as our tiny leafy minds can understand it, software on an associated PC looks for the distinctive features on the page that you might be observing. 'It then draws the computer graphics from exactly the same viewpoint,' said Dr Billinghurst who heads the HIT Lab. Is that freaky or is it just us?

NZ children’s book illustrator Gavin Bishop has been the first writer to have his work subjected to 'Augmented Reality technology' (eek!) with his book Giant Jimmy Jones. But a medical textbook (human anatomy) has also had the treatment and has further taken advantage of an 'immersive virtual world' capability, enabling the viewer to get inside a human heart and experience what it’s like to be a blood corpuscle being swept through the aorta …

We just hope they don’t use it for the next Katherine Mansfield book. That just wouldn’t be cricket.