To Turn The World Into A Web Page, Mobile Browsers Need To Improve Figuring Out Locations

Augmented reality browsers use a mobile phone’s camera to digest a scene and annotate it with web-connected flair: live directions, geotagged tweets, reviews that hover over restaurants.

But the current generation of AR browsers is lagging on geolocation, are content-poor, and have limited interactivity, according to a recent paper (paywall) in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Geographic certitude is at the core of everything an AR browser does. Seamless AR browsing has to integrate sensor data from GPS (location); body direction (compass); and pose, or where the device is pointed (gyroscope and accelerometer). The Austrian team says that the current level of consumer-grade hardware can’t deliver all of this accurately, and that future AR browsers can overcome this by being more clever about the way they use computational resources.