MWI Team Blog

There is a lot of buzz these around augmented reality in general, and mobile specifically (just search for "augmented reality" on twitter - there is a new tweet every minute or so).

How can these new interaction paradigms be integrated into the platform of the Web and evolve to be as open and inclusive as the Web?

To understand this and related questions, Dan Applequist of Vodafone, Rittwik Jana of AT&T Labs Research, Christine Perey of PEREY Research & Consulting and myself are co-chairing the WWW2010 workshop "MobEA-2010: Augmented Reality and Virtual Interactivity".

The Call for papers includes a long list of topics - of particular interest to the mobile community could be:

• Mobile AR development environments and toolkits
• Extensions to current Web technologies (e.g. CSS) to support AR
• Multiuser and Distributed gaming
• Mobile Tracking & Sensing for AR
• User studies and evaluation
• Mobile Presence and cognition in AR
• Mobile Widgets and Mashups for AR
• How do Web browsers need to evolve to become AR platforms?
• Role of voice and multimodal technologies/applications in AR
• Media adaptation and content filtering
• What device APIs accessible within the browser would be requisite in order to deliver an AR experience?
• Cross platform AR services (e.g. 3 screen services (TV, PC, phone))

If you have worked on these or related topics, and in particular if you have demos:

Paper submission is open until February 21 - check out the Call for papers for details.

Version 1.3.0 of the online W3C mobileOK Checker service is out. On top of the usual bug fixes and clarifications of messages, here are a couple of features which I hope will be useful.

Many thanks to users of the W3C mobileOK Checker who provided feedback and helped identify bugs!

File upload and direct input methods

Users rightly complained that the W3C mobileOK Checker only worked on content that was already available on the Web. Web authors usually start with local content and publish it once they are happy with the result. The mobileOK Checker comes after the battle here... There existed good reasons to restrict checks to published Web content as some of the mobileOK tests apply to the HTTP headers sent along with the content and thus cannot be run when the content is not available using HTTP.

Anyway, you can now check content for mobile-friendliness using file upload and direct input.

As already mentioned, some mobileOK tests only apply partially or do not apply at all when these input methods are used. For instance, the total size of the page is not accurate if stylesheets and images cannot be retrieved by the W3C mobileOK Checker. In short, the report is incomplete and the content cannot claim to be mobileOK™ as long as the remaining tests have not been enforced.

The Checker retrieves as many resources as possible and ignores those that cannot be retrieved when file upload or direct input is used. If the HTML content references a CSS stylesheet using an absolute HTTP URI, the Checker will retrieve and run tests on that stylesheet. Similarly, the base HTML element may be used to set the base HTTP URI against which the Checker will resolve relative links, as illustrated in the following example:

The Checker can retrieve the W3C.gif image in the above example even if the content is provided as direct input because its address can be resolved against the base element, leading to the http://www.w3.org/Mobile/W3C.gif absolute HTTP address.

Obviously, this does not work if the base element is a relative URI itself, or if the rest of the content is not available.

Source listing

The W3C mobileOK Checker sometimes returns failures that do not seem to originate from the content under test. That is, the incriminated code does not reveal itself when one right clicks and selects View source on one's favorite desktop browser.

Most of the time, the reason for that apparent disconnection is that the server uses content adaptation and sends different content to the browser and to the W3C mobileOK Checker. The W3C mobileOK Checker uses specific HTTP headers to retrieve resources as if it were a mobile device. To avoid losing precious time to realize that the tests were simply run on the mobile version of the content, the report now includes the listing of the source that was received by the mobileOK Checker for reference.

I'm glad that the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group I have been co-chairing eventually published its mobile Web for social development roadmap, its most important deliverable.

This is finalizing 16 months of hard work and discussions. We hope now to receive comments from different groups including the Web Accessibility Initiative, the W3C Internationalization Working Group, Mobile Web Best Practices, Voice Browser, but also from the community working in the field (NGOs, development agencies, etc.).

I believe this document is an important milestone in the path to extend the frontier of the Web in developing regions. It is the first document published by W3C that investigate the potential of the Web and mobile technologies in the Social Development domain, and identifies technology (and other) gaps to be bridged in the future by W3C, the Web Foundation and others.

It is also in my opinion a useful resource for those in the field willing to mainstream mobile technologies in their project. Having discussed with and visited different organizations deploying mobile content and applications in the field, I have come to realized that many of them have a vision of how ICT can help achieving their own goals/impact, but are missing an overview of the available technology landscape. They are usually moving from the vision to the tools directly: looking at what they can find on the market, and using it. I think that it is critical to add an intermediary step, before moving to the tools, to look at the specific needs, profile and requirements of the targeted end-users, the objective of the application, and the complete life-cycle of the project before choosing a particular (set of) technology(ies). The MW4D roadmap hopes to fill this gap, helping organizations to understand the technology landscape and informing them on the critical factors to consider before choosing one specific option.

Obviously, this is only a first step. They are lots of directions to explore. For instance, the document does not investigate specific application fields, and it would be interesting to understand the specificities of each domain (health, government, education, etc.), to identify patterns or information needs that are relevant to these domains, and how to address them. The current roadmap also focuses on using mobile phones to access content, but not to author or deliver content. If mobile phones are really the “computer for Africa”, it is critical to investigate how these devices could become an authoring platform, or a delivery platform (e.g. hosting a web server to deliver content and share information with surrounding clients).

This are only a few examples of potential future items for our group. The group just got an extension till the end of February 2010 to build a new charter, and define its future. Note that the MW4D IG is a public Interest Group, and does not require W3C membership to participate. See details on how to join the MW4D IG.

Therefore, I encourage everybody interested in this topic to join the group, the mailing-list and the bi-monthly teleconferences to participate in the work on this future new charter.

I also encourage everyone to read the published MW4D roadmap and provide feedback!

Stephane