Tomorrow, you will not access facebook.com

This is a longish post about how Augmented Reality could revolutionize the virtual space as we know it. The post was featured in the September edition of Technology Sunday.

Today, you probably start and end the day with Facebook. If not you, 70,000 locals do. Facebook, and all the other social media tools, changed the way we consume the web. Prior to that you would read the news on timesofmalta.com but now you get to read a news headline because someone else posts it. Today, you can just get the snippets of your favourite websites on your profile in the form of widgets or boxes. iGoogle is the perfect example of how at least 65 million webpages need to rethink their strategy for staying in touch with you. Similar tools allow you to even do away with Google’s humble homepage.

The social web has re-defined the World Wide Web and added a social context to it. Everything is social. Every site or item which goes online has a social value. Users tag it, post it, blog about it and share it in all kinds of ways.

Tomorrow, the web will experience another wave of innovation which will revolutionize the way we interact with content and communicate with each other. Augmented Reality (AR) will fragment the social web into layers of data, sitting on nothing more than real-time video streams of the real world. We will access the web as layers of information overlaid on the real 3D objects (or people) they relate to.

Before, online games were played individually, through the browser. Then came the social web - our friends could join the game too and play with us in real-time. Eventually, we stopped playing games on the specific web-pages and simply played any game through our favourite social tool.. Tomorrow, we will be playing the same game but the protagonists will not be 3D images which represent objects or users, we will have real objects and real people moving around our screen. They will be fed through the camera of our mobile device (whatever the device may be) and an application will overlay computer graphics on the real-life video feeds.

Actually, we are already seeing hints of this today. To launch the HTC Magic in one of the markets in which it operates, Vodafone has used an AR application which allowed two teams to compete head to head by tagging their rivals through image recognition of coloured shirts using the device itself.

In 2001 the first AR Browser was launched. The browser acted as an AR based interface to the web. Though innovative, the RWWW system was not very practical due to its cumbersome AR hardware which included a head mounted display. 7 years later Wikitude implemented a similar, but more compact idea on a mobile phone. The more recent browser combines location data with Wikipedia entries. This year a similar concept was implemented through Layar. The browser builds on Wikitude’s concept by reducing traditional webpages into content layers sitting on top of each other and overlaid on the real world video feeds.

However, what is most important is not how all this is done but what it really means for us. AR complements the convergence of online and offline worlds. Online social networks are really a reflection of what happens in the offline world. AR blends the real (offline) world with the online information and services. Rather than a reflection, the web will gradually become part of what we see when we move around the real world.

In practice, AR will allow us to consume the web in a completely new way. When in a big crowd, I could poke you without logging onto the Facebook homepage by simply nudging your real-life image, fed into my device through its camera. Paypal’s changehowwepay.com envisages a future in which I could scan images of any product at the supermarket and ‘drag’ them onto my virtual shopping cart.

Industry leaders are aware of all this and they are doing something about it. At the 2009 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), AR will not only be discussed in context of scientific and technological advancements but also as part of a wider initiative to make the most of AR technology in arts, media and humanities.

Needless to say, if AR had to become the standard way of web consumption, once again, brand managers would have to re-think the way they put their brand in context of the real world. The fancy online spaces which they have invested in have already been humbled by social networks which feed content from them to our social profile, doing away with the nice design on the brand’s site.

However it is not all doom and gloom. If the social web made brands social and helped them to relate to us through our network of friends, then it should only get better. AR will put brands in context. Tomorrow, brands will not only be able to relate to our circle of friends but also customize their message in context of what we wear, where we go and what we see. In parallel, we will probably see the death of the traditional webpage.