The Real-World Wide Web Rises Again: ISMAR 2008 panel on the Future of AR

As I sit in the ISMAR panelon "the future of AR", I'm reminded of work I did with Rob Kooper (a former student in my lab) back around 2000, on the "Real-world wide web".

The idea behind the real-world wide web (admittedly, not a great name) is to create a wearable AR interface to the web;  
the fundamental assumption on which it is based was that you could author and query information based on location,
not just content.  
{% capture ca-cite %}{% reference kooper2003browsing %}{% endcapture %}
In that work{% sidenotevar "chang-ungar" ca-cite %}, we brought up a lot of issues that would need to be addressed to make such an interface work, to make it safe and to make authoring and query practical.

The world has changed a lot;  Web 2.0 has arrived;  mobile phones are powerful;  RSS feeds, user-generated content and social networking are concepts familiar to a large part of the digital society.  And now, the AR community is finally starting to turn toward this problem.