AiRWeb: Using AR to Extend Web Browsing Beyond Handheld Screens
This work aims to improve the web browsing experience for mobile users by overcoming the limitations of small screens, offering a more expansive and personalized content organization.
This paper addresses the problem of limited screen space for web browsing on mobile devices by introducing AiRWeb, an augmented reality (AR) system that allows users to offload web content into the surrounding physical space. The system enables users to select, offload, and arrange web content flexibly, and a preliminary study suggests it is learnable and usable.
Browsing the Web on mobile devices is often cumbersome due to their limited screen space. We investigate a phone+AR Web browsing approach, AiRWeb, that leverages the structural properties of Web pages to allow users to seamlessly select and offload arbitrary Web content into the space surrounding them. Focusing on flexibility, AiRWeb lets users decide what to offload, when to do so, and how offloaded content is arranged, enabling personalized organization tailored to the task at hand. We developed a fully functional prototype using standard Web technologies, that covers the complete interaction workflow, from the selection of elements to offload from the phone to their manipulation in the air. Results from a preliminary study conducted using this prototype suggest that AiRWeb is learnable and usable, while also revealing open design challenges around offload mode activation in particular.