Mobile Augmented Reality for Browsing Physical Spaces

Browsing, a concept usually reserved for the on-line world, consists in a sequence of media consumptions and clicks: reading text, looking at images, watching videos, interlaced with clicks that take us from one content to another. A similar concept does not yet fully exist in the physical world. In this paper we present a system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to obtain information about the objects on a shelf, and Augmented Reality (AR) to let users click on a live image of that shelf shown on a handheld device, accessing the information about the objects located in the vicinity of the clicked spot. A smart shelf with RFID has been set up to which a AR marker has been added to be able to map physical to screen coordinates. Testing and validation of system is done with different number of books at different locations on a shelf. The resulting experience is close to browsing a shelf, clicking on it and obtaining information about the objects it contains.