Touch-Based Access to Mobile Internet - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 232

The next wave of growth in the technology
outside the traditional PC desktop use is often
thought in mundane terms - with such things as
cell phones and PDAs. In reality, we stand on the
verge of an era that will see previously unimagined
networked devices and objects (Meloan, 2003).
There are already some exciting applications
that span the technology spectrum. Such diverse
networked “devices” offer concrete evidence of
Metcalfe's Law (Metcalfe, 1995). Metcalfe, one
of the developers of Ethernet, formulated that the
usefulness of a network increases by the square
of the number of nodes (users or devices) con-
nected to the network. “In the future, everything
of value will be on the network in one form of
another,” says John Fowler, Software CTO of
Sun Microsystems (Meloan, 2003). “And once
they're on the network, we can aggregate data
from those diverse devices, and then deliver that
data to equally diverse devices - in informative
and compelling ways. Most people think of a PC
or a PDA as things connected to the network,”
continues Fowler. “But here we are connecting
trees, race cars, and astronauts to the network. It's
going to become a much more seamless spectrum.”
We currently see a rise to various concepts
that integrate the physical world with the virtual
one. One of the most popular is the ability to
access electronic information from virtually any
objects, a vision of the “Internet of Things” (ITU
Internet Reports 2005; Saint-Exupery, 2009), as
a parallel to the real Internet. Industry and aca-
demia have shown big interest in the “Internet of
Things” (IoT) in which the Internet extends into
our everyday lives through a wireless network
of uniquely identifiable objects. Here real world
objects have an individual digital presence as em-
bedded computers or visual markers on everyday
objects allow things and information about them
to be accessible in the digital world; physical
objects are uniquely identified and described in a
standardized way which facilitates access to and
interaction with them.

The Mobile Internet has shown that technologi-
cal advances and service availability alone do not
result in widespread adoption and use (Constantiou
et al., 2007). There are still challenges in the Mo-
bile Internet hindering usage and slowing down
adoption rates. An example of such a challenge
is our limited understanding of how the Mobile
Internet differs from the traditional internet ex-
perienced through a fixed desktop environment
(Isomursu et al., 2007).
Research on mixed reality user interfaces (Mil-
gram et al., 1994) has explored how our physical
environment could be enhanced with digital con-
tent and services by mixing digital information and
affordances with our physical world. The Internet
of Things implies a symbiotic interaction among
the real/physical, the digital/virtual worlds: physi-
cal entities have digital counterparts and virtual
representation; things become context aware and
they can sense, communicate, interact, exchange
data, information and knowledge. NFC (Near
Field Communication) technology provides one
alternative for adding a link between an object in
the physical world and digital content and services
associated with that object. This link can be used
by direct physical manipulation to provide digital
services through a physical interface. These kinds
of physical mobile interactions make it possible
to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual
world in an intuitive way (Falke et al., 2007).
The combination of RFID and visual tagging
of everyday physical objects and NFC-enabled
devices can foster the “Internet of Things” where
every resource that surrounds us and its associ-
ated services are available through some kind
of networking and programming infrastructure
(López-de-Ipiña et al., 2007).

TOUCH TO ACCESS
MOBILE INTERNET

Accessing internet content through objects in
the physical world is called physical browsing