Physical browsing

The prevalent visions of ambient intelligence emphasise natural interaction between user and functions and services embedded in the environment or available through mobile devices. In these scenarios, the physical and virtual worlds seamlessly gear into each other, making crossing the border between these worlds natural or even invisible to the user. The bottleneck in reaching these scenarios appears in the natural mapping between the physical objects and their virtual counterparts. Physical browsing is a means for mapping this digital information and physical objects in our environment

Implementing TouchMe paradigm with a mobile phone

In earlier papers, the concept of Physical Browsing has been suggested as a natural way to improve the usability of mobile devices and to enable interaction with digital services associated with real world objects in the environment. Since mobile phones are very widely used, it offers a good platform for pervasive applications. In this paper, we realize the Physical Browsing concept using an RFID-reader. With the reader attached to the mobile phone, we invoke digital services embedded in the environment. The implementation of the software needed for ubiquitous use of physical browsing is presented and the feasibility is demonstrated with four concrete examples. 1