Augmented reality as an enabling factor for the Internet of Things

As the vision of a world of networked smart objects moves from a futuristic idea by visionary researchers to an emerging reality that shapes the cities of the future around the world a number of issues arise. Novel approaches such as those of ubiquitous computing have proven the technological feasibility of that Internet of Things, but they still lack a shared, robust and unquestionable answer on how to effectively connect smart environments and people. Traditional interaction technologies have shown until today poor capabilities to provide a rich user experience in high-density smart environments. Such environments require of an increased level of tangibility for the points of interests with no compromise of the overall usability. This position paper is aimed to support the idea of Augmented Reality as the key tool to build user interfaces fitting the specific interaction requirements of the Internet of Things. 1. Today's scenarios In the last years, the amount of relevant information that individuals manage during their day- by-day interactions in real-life environments has been growing in exponential manner. Specifically, this phenomenon has been lately specially within outdoor scenarios. An increasing number of points of interest is being created, tagged and shared continuously by users from all around the world. People maps places, buildings, devices and also services by recording its latitude, longitude and altitude. Today, the geographically tagged information is mainly exploited by means of services called location-based services. Although that kind of services haven't really provided a breakthrough innovation on IT applications or human-machine interaction, some experiences offer an interesting approach on the interpretation of the relationship between individuals and the environment. One of these added-value location- based services is the SEMAPEDIA project (http://semapedia.org/), where users print stickers with QR codes and put into the real world in order to offer a readable link from the physical world to the virtual world, in this case, the Wikipedia. Today, location-based services have gone massive with the popularization of platforms like Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) and Gowalla (http://gowalla.com).