Currently being developed for mobile phones are augmented reality browsers. Instead of using a mobile Web browser like Safari or Opera, Augmented Reality Browsers add an information layer over the world as seen through your phone’s camera lens. Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera is one example of current research on AR, Layar is also creating its own development, and this summer AR technologies finally started to hit the market.
However, these are very early stages for common mobile browsing. With these developments at the moment we can only click on buildings or objects within your immediate view from this type of browser. Daniel Wagner, a virtual reality researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria, is proposing two ways to make AR browsing better: panoramic and bird’s-eye zooming.
In his work it was demonstrated these two types of zooming techniques which allow the user to zoom out, much like one would with an online map, select something to click on and then zoom back in. The panoramic zoom gives the user a sense of other clickable items within a 360 degree view, whereas the bird’s-eye view gives a top-down picture that looks like a close-up satellite shot with clickable locations.
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