A boom of augmented reality applications (AR) are coming to the market claiming to be the World browsers: Acrossair Wikitude Layar Sekai camera Graffiti geo or Cyclopedia among others define themselfs as new hybrid windows to the world around us. Given this emerging scenario, several questions arise of any kind that Marshall Kirkpatrick has summarized in Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That’s Everywhere:

Added value, social experiences, real-time information delivery, user experience, interoperability and openness – those are the problems of the web! So too goes the development of Augmented Reality, the web of everywhere.

Concerns over freedom and privacy (intrinsically linked to its accessibility) deserve special attention:

It’s a lot of Wow and skepticism right now, but in the future it could be a thriving ecosystem of rich information about the world around us. Or it could be a closed, proprietary (literal) lens through which we view the world – unable to change the way we view that world or see it as others do because our accumulated knowledge is trapped inside one platform and inaccessible from others. Or there could be a plague of spam that overwhelms our view-finder into our physical surroundings.

This web of everywhere should not fail to be anything other than the web itself, and therefore use the same standards, protocols and requirements. TwittAround shows that we do not have to use anything other than a mobile web browser to experience this new dimension of the Internet. It is therefore very likely that the money that are generating some companies now is the result of the unavailability of equivalent web tools, which however will soon be published under GPL license by any of the many developers who take care of the net neutrality.

If we think AR as a coming and conventional web browsing feature other questions arise, for example, from what sources will the contents be downloaded and how will we filter them? Currently Layar or Wikitude allow you to select the sources in a similar way that in Google Earth, activating “layers” from a limited list. But in the web of everywhere and everybody, there will be so many layers as web pages. How to select or look for them? Probably we will use our favorite local search engine, using a quick gesture to turn from the map view to AR view.

Augmented reality as a new browsing mode has a great future ahead, but these specialized applications will soon become isolated when browsers and popular content providers will cover this feature as Google Maps already does with Street View.

As in other battles of the web, the core are the contents, that is, the ability of each browser to display them properly and the ability of the search engines to filter them for each user. But in the spatial web, the search engine also serves as browser, allowing us to freely move and explore the map without having to predefine a specific search. The browsearchs of the world (with or without augmented reality) must fulfill both tasks effectively and get an AR browsing feature if they want to be perceived as advanced or modern environments.

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