Walled Gardens: Apps and Data as Barriers to Augmenting Reality

For augmented reality (AR) to reach its potential, AR content from multiple distinct sources must be simultaneously displayed in a more unified manner than is possible given today's application-centric environments. AR browsers and AR-enabled Web browsers point toward the functionalities that OSs must incorporate to fully support AR content. Also, application developers need richer forms of content describing the physical world and the objects in it. Standards such as ARML (Augmented Reality Markup Language) 2.0 have begun providing the glue needed to bind AR content to the physical world.