Contextual Bookmarks

The role of digital information in everyday life divides out activities in interacting with the physical and the digital world. There is no connection between these worlds that is easily accessible, even though physical objects, persons, and real world events often have digital counterparts. The physical reality is actually overlaid by an additional virtual or digital layer. As we are acting in the physical and the digital world it is desirable that we can use links that bridge the gap between both worlds. In this paper we describe our approach to narrow this gap. Starting from a scenario that shows the demand for such connections, we present an architecture that allows users to bookmark specific situations. Based on these contextual bookmarks the user can request additional digital information. Our first prototype enables the user to bookmark content shown on public displays by taking photos of the display using a mobile phone. Our system combines content analysis of the photo with context information such as position, creation time, etc. in order to form the basis to establish a link to the digital world. The presented architecture will serve as a flexible solution to find and integrate further connections between the physical and the digital world.