
The Physical Web - gelliott
https://github.com/google/physical-web
======
CapitalistCartr
" . . . a vending machine, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car, and not
have to download an app first in order to use it."

I can, and do, do that now. I don't need or use an app to interact with any of
those things, and when I have been offered apps, they've been worse than
useless. Seriously, worse than nothing, they've been annoying, harassing,
clunky junk.

I just want to be able to approach any of these things and pull up all of the
documentation regarding it. On my phone, tablet, laptop, etc. No "advertising
tracking" nonsense. How to use it or fix it. If the owner wants to turn this
feature off, they should be able to, but it should be on by default. If the
owner thinks its a security loophole, he is both mistaken and lacking in
security.

This includes stores. Why can I find a shelf stocker in Target and he can use
his li'l belt computer to tell me where anything is in the store, down to the
shelf, and how many they have, but I can't have access to that information
before I enter the store? Big box stores were never so annoying until I got
used to Amazon.

~~~
stronglikedan
> I don't need or use an app to interact with any of those things, and when I
> have been offered apps, they've been worse than useless.

A store clerk recently invited me to download their app, and when I showed her
that it requested _every_ _single_ permission, she was still baffled as to why
I would want to cancel the download.

> Why can I find a shelf stocker in Target and he can use his li'l belt
> computer to tell me where anything is in the store, down to the shelf, and
> how many they have, but I can't have access to that information before I
> enter the store?

Home Depot's mobile app will tell you exactly where an item is on the shelf,
including aisle, section, and level. They even have a map so you can find
items that aren't on numbered aisles. It's fantastic.

~~~
troisx
Home Depot is terrible at actually tracking their inventory. There app is
useless when it tells you where the item is, only to find out that they
actually don't have any in stock despite what their tracking system says.

I order easily 20x as many items from Amazon, and never had an email saying
"oops, we actually don't have any in stock".

~~~
notatoad
And this is why the stores don't give out their actual inventory numbers to
the public: because they can't accurately track those numbers. Things get
stolen, lost in storage, and moved off their shelf to promotional displays.

~~~
bigtunacan
And then people complain about how "useless" the app is. This is much less of
a problem for Amazon where there aren't any thieving customers in the store.

~~~
drivingmenuts
It _is_ useless if the information provided isn't correct. In some cases, it's
actually worse than useless.

------
callahad
Huh, this sounds like it could dovetail beautifully with FirefoxOS's attempt
to blur the lines between "native apps" and web content.

It'd probably be pretty easy to have these things show up in an "Ambient"
smart collection on the homescreen, or in the universal search pane...

Edit: Looks like you can get this running on an RFDuino
([https://github.com/google/physical-
web/blob/master/documenta...](https://github.com/google/physical-
web/blob/master/documentation/getting_started.md)), which are currently $20 at
MicroCenter, and a USB shield is $25. Still 2 in stock in the Twin Cities, if
anyone else is interested!

Edit 2: ...Though, it looks like FxOS doesn't currently support BLE
([https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Bluetooth#Unsupported_Bluetooth...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Bluetooth#Unsupported_Bluetooth_Profiles)),
so this may not be the most useful path at the moment. :)

------
gpsx
I think this is a great interface. This is cast as a discovery system for
public devices but I think it is equally well suited for remote control of
private devices.

The writeup indicates the beacons run in broadcast mode. I think it would be
good if there were also a discovery mode where the client could ping devices
and they could respond. This would be good for a few use cases, including
“private” devices like things in your home. These devices could be configured
to only respond to certain clients.

For home devices, another feature that would be nice is if the device could
use http-over-BLE to service the web request itself. The device would run a
small web server and the web page on the client would be the user interface
for the device. For home automation there are these complicated specifications
for different device types, but HTML is the perfect interface to run any
device.

------
CanSpice
The company I work for (IoT Design Shop -
[http://iotdesignshop.com/](http://iotdesignshop.com/)) is actually releasing
beacons and software that does exactly this. We have a BLE beacon called
Signul that couples with an app that allows you to do all kinds of hyper-local
interactions.

Right now you can support our Indiegogo campaign
([https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/signul-the-world-s-
first-...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/signul-the-world-s-first-
personal-beacon-system/x/4265882)) and get a Signul beacon. I have a prototype
version and it's really quite good.

If the Indiegogo campaign hits $50k (it's currently sitting at $31k) we're
going to release an SDK for Signul allowing anybody to write an app that
interacts with the Signul beacon for either iOS or Android devices.

------
doctorfoo
I kinda hoped the devices would actually serve the apps themselves. I guess a
URL makes more sense though. But I wonder if it will lead to physical devices
that give 404s when they are obsoleted.

Anyway, this seems pretty exciting.

~~~
garethadams
There's no reason it couldn't mean that anyway - if a device is open to the
Internet then the URL it serves via Physical Web could easily be its own. But
it allows for less-smart devices too.

The biggest problem I can see, as with all proximity devices, is spoofing. How
do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not
someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

~~~
tetrep
>How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not
someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

The same way you know that top search results are accurate for a given
word/phrase. As stated multiple times throughout the introduction[1] the
solution for filtering out spam will probably have an implementation similar
to internet search engines.

[1]: [https://github.com/google/physical-
web/blob/master/documenta...](https://github.com/google/physical-
web/blob/master/documentation/introduction.md)

~~~
donutz
How do I know the top 100 items listed as "Bus Stop" aren't someone's
malicious raspberry pi hidden in the bushes, spitting out hundreds of URLs and
varying the signal strength so they appear to be coming from different
locations and...wait a minute. I think my phone just got DOS'ed.

~~~
csuwldcat
The addition/counter to the Physical Web proposal I have been discussing with
Google prevents these kinds of security issues in many locations/places: meet
Geo-Origins --> [https://github.com/csuwildcat/geo-
origins/blob/master/explai...](https://github.com/csuwildcat/geo-
origins/blob/master/explainer.md)

------
Animats
Isn't this what QR codes on signs were supposed to do?

You don't need an "app" just to talk to some retail thing. Many retail apps
are a dodge to get inside your phone and snoop around, acquire your contacts
list, and track where you are.

~~~
solipsism
Yep, this is just QR codes made better. It's similar to pet microchip implants
too. The only app you need is one that knows how to listen for the signals and
point you in the right direction when you choose to visit one.

~~~
x1798DE
How is this similar to pet microchip implants? If there were a way to robustly
put a QR code on my pet instead of using a microchip, I would - you'd be able
to identify easily that the pet is tagged, and the readout devices would be
more widespread.

I also don't see _at all_ how this is better than a QR code on a physical
object, other than that it's invisible - which is itself not great, since
unless you allow these things to be intrusive and pop up something on your
phone when you get too near to one (no thanks), there's no built-in call to
action. You'd basically need a sticker on everything supporting this that
says, "I support Physical Web!"... in which case you might as well have a QR
code.

~~~
solipsism
_How is this similar to pet microchip implants_

In that it's a thing that's hidden in an object that you can scan for that
identifies it and gives information about it.

 _there 's no built-in call to action._

It's trivially and plainly better than a QR code on a physical object. Even if
you did have to have a sticker on everything saying "I support Physical Web",
the fact that I don't have to scan the sticker -- instead I can just click it
in my phone -- makes it better. But I don't think you're using your
imagination if you think you'd have to have a sticker on every single thing
that broadcast itself. Let me use my imagination for a second.

When I enter a garage it would be nice to not have to look around for a QR
sticker, reach my hand out of the car with my phone, and scan it. I would just
know that when I enter a garage my top hit when I bring up the Physical Web
(for lack of a better name) will almost certainly be the garage's interface to
allow me to pay.

When I'm walking around a city it might be nice if I, casually browsing the
Physical Web, could notice that someone near me is willing to sell bitcoins
for cash-in-hand in a virtually untraceable transaction, without having to see
and scan a QR code on that person's forehead.

It would be nice if I could set my phone to automatically tell me over
headphones that the next bus is expected in N minutes whenever I walked up to
a bus stop, all without requiring me to pull my phone out or take my gloves
off in the middle of a Chicago winter.

You're just not thinking outside the box.

~~~
x1798DE
I don't know that it's _plainly_ better than a QR code, but your point is
presumably well taken that if a broad area were saturated in ID signals that
would be better than a single fixed QR code, _once the user knows that the
physical web is supported_. I was thinking mainly of this in the context in
which it was presented, which is being embedded in discrete objects like
vending machines or the like, in which case the search space for a QR code is
fairly small, and advertising that the physical web is supported could be
replaced by existing technology.

I also don't see that it's "plainly better" to click on it through a phone. It
depends on the different interfaces. How much do each of these things cost? If
we're allowed to spend infinite money on any minor improvement, why not give
everyone HUDs with high resolution cameras that can scan any QR code within
line of sight? How much battery life are these scans taking? How much
complexity do they add to the phone UI? What will the security issues be? I'm
just not sold on the big benefits here.

------
csuwldcat
I have been discussing this proposal with the folks at Google, and generated
an additional proposal, Geo-Origins, to address some of the issues Physical
Web introduces: [https://github.com/csuwildcat/geo-
origins/blob/master/explai...](https://github.com/csuwildcat/geo-
origins/blob/master/explainer.md)

Geo-Origins brings the trust model of the web to the physical world, and
allows for more frictionless interactions in many locations.

------
tarikozket
Oh, now
iBeacons([https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/](https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/))
will make more sense. Let's implement iBeacons to vending machines and also to
other machines, then use
Pushmote([https://pushmote.com](https://pushmote.com)) to manage interactions
from cloud and import Pushmote SDK into operating systems or Chrome natively.
Sounds great. :)

------
resiros
I like the idea, but the first version seems quite limited. It is more of a
GPS based webapp discovery tool. You click on the button, the app sends your
GPS coordinate to the main server, which returns all useful webapps in the
neighborhood.

I think that using NFC chips, which are extremely cheap, is very appropriate
here. Use case: You point your phone to the vending machine/renting car and
the respective webapp is shown automatically on your phone.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
NFC is tough because you have to be within about an inch of it to get a
reliable connection. For the use cases of a parking meter or vending machine
it works, but for a bus stop or store it becomes yet another thing to stand in
line for.

~~~
jsolson
I haven't even had good luck with the parking meters in Seattle :(

------
paulojreis
> "The number of smart devices is going to explode (...)"

But why? Why are you/they so sure? Why do we assume that humans will just
appropriate any kind of technology thrown at them?

I assume this comes from educated tech guys, who are thorough with their work,
tools and respective usage. How can they be so lighthearted with the premises
which relate to human usage of technology?

~~~
tree_of_item
I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology". The number of smart
devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things, and
collect lots of data. It'd be great if I could ask my stove what food I've
eaten this month, how healthy it was, how expensive it was, maybe even tell it
to start preparing dinner at a certain time. The way to do that is to put a
computer in everything.

~~~
paulojreis
> I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology".

People accepting, wanting, using and integrating said technology in everyday
life.

> The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate
> all the things

This is precisely what I'm questioning. "We want"? How can you know that? I
believe you want that, I believe that maybe people in your circles do, too.
Still, that is no evidence at all to extrapolate that "we want".

~~~
nine_k
There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells.

Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers,
dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were
widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking
about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a
button explaining approximately what type of clothes are there, and walk away.
The machine figures the rest.

This is a type of liberation people seem to actually like.

Also, people usually don't like uncertainty puzzling new experiences. Letting
people on a stop see where the bus is does make people happier. (Myself I use
a mobile web site that shows real-time position of NYC buses, and can attest
to that.) If you walk into an unfamiliar store, especially abroad, it could
take some time to find simplest items like a bottle of water. If there was a
more-or-less unified 'online' interface for finding things in this particular
store on your phone, it would make many tourists happier.

~~~
paulojreis
> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. > > Last time I checked,
> mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing
> machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted.

Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how
can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts
and early adopters?

I mean: it is rather "easy" to see a big increase in sales for a given
technology, when it is "young". The big question is how sustained that growth
will be, when the early adopters are served and the company needs to target
"regular" people.

~~~
NovaS1X
>And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-
enthusiasts and early adopters?

I don't think it matters. The future of smart-devices is looking good of a
number of reasons and this is why more than a few people think that smart-
devices are going to see widespread adoption.

"Everyday people" don't need to be the ones adopting this widely just yet.
There's a trend in the evolution of technology where people don't know that
they want/need a specific technology until they've been shown the power of it.
"Everyday people" never asked for Home PCs; they were pushed to them and now
it's hard to imagine life without a home computer. "Everyday people" never
asked for smartphones; they were pushed by technology companies and now
they're almost a mandatory device for navigating modern culture.

I think smart-devices will see the same fate. There is a lot of talk and
development into IoT and technologists see the power of such networks even if
"everyday people" do not. Smart-devices are a natural progression of IoT and
the other devices everyone already has in their pockets. I think it will be
adopted in the same way other technologies have: It will see small, and then
large-scale adoption in a niche area, people will see the power of IoT and
smart-devices, and then people will begin to want it everywhere. This will be
driven by technologist support and marketing.

The article may have presented the outcome a little optimistic but I don't
then they're far off the mark.

~~~
xg15
This was certainly true for the past, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate for
the future. The events of the recent years have given the public not just a
sense of the power of technology but also its negative side.

At least here in germany, the Snowden relevations have done a good deal to
make people realize just much much data about them is on their net and how
hard it is to control access to it.

Revelations like Apple using iPhones for large scale profiling of location
histories and (much later) Samsung having its TVs report home with a history
of viewed programs didn't put smart devices in a good light either.

In parallel, numerous hacker and data leak scandals taught the public that
maybe data entrusted to the cloud isn't as secure as everyone promised.

Finally, many people only now start to realize just how much a paradigm shift
the internet really caused and what some of the psychological and sociological
implications might be: There is the (still vaguely defined) "internet" or
"mobile addiction", there is the growing trend of viewing phone usage (or
usage of other devices, i.e. Google Glass) during social gatherings as
impolite, there is the whole discussion about what role privacy should play in
the future, etc, etc.

All of this doesn't stop people from buying new phones, TVs, fitness bands,
etc. But depending on who you ask, they do it with a growing bad conscience.
If you try to introduce new technologies that have a higher cost and less
obvious benefits (like smart homes), it might have an effect.

------
EGreg
I guess one of the biggest questions here would be authentication and
reputation. You want to make sure the device is what you think it is. So they
will need to have cryptographically signed messages, ie MAC, and you need to
obtain a certificate as well from their server on the web in order to interact
with them.

But once you have those, you WON'T need the internet in order to communicate.
The vending machine could be in a basement and bluetooth would be enough.

I'm a big proponent of re-decentralizing the internet again, and the web (and
physical web) is a big part of that. There's no reason why people in an
african village MUST have all their cell signals travel up to a balloon and to
Facebook's servers just to communicate with each other. Mesh networking and
distributed power generation will bring about a revolution.

------
fiatjaf
Most normal people I see carrying a smartphone actually never use the browser.
Never. I mean NEVER.

~~~
cromwellian
People use the browser very regularly and don't realize it because it's an
embedded webkit. A classic example is people sharing articles on social
networks.

Native apps are a bad experience for this kind of application because they are
not ephemeral. If everything in your environment has an app associated with
it, then your phone will be clogged with hundreds or thousands of apps, 99% of
which you never open. You want a transaction-cost free model for
envirnonmental interaction, the same as 'surfing' the web. No persistent cost
for experimenting or trying something out.

The whole idea of "installing" stuff has really regressed computing back to
the 90s. The web introduced the idea of emphemeral applications which are
cached, so that you never need to manage the memory of your device.

I'd like to see mobile native apps adopt Web-style model. You can pin the
cache and permanently install apps that are important to you or have giant
resources (like huge games), but most of your apps should backup-and-delete
themselves on the fly when coming into disuse and space is needed.

I'm sick of being asked to rate apps, and sick of having to delete apps to
make space.

Steve Jobs once said "if you see a task manager, they blew it" Because people
shouldn't have to manage the kernel resources of their phone. To that I would
add, "if you see an install button, they blew it", because people should not
have to manage their flash memory.

I thought the nightmare of cleaning up your computing devices went out with
utilities to clean Windows drives and registry in the 90s.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I agree with you. The problem as I see it is iOS-induced obsession with
hardware I accelerated special effects. It's easy to make a web app that's
silky smooth and has highly optimized paths for interaction, but iOS
worshipping has caused us all (web and native developers both) to abandon
interaction design for special effects design.

Sad to think that 2000-2010 was actually the golden age for genuine focus on
interaction design. Ironic too that Apple was the company who killed it.

I should add: Apple generally does _great_ interaction design. But they bundle
it with expensive special effects and visual design. Everyone else tries to
copy all three, but they can't, because it's insanely hard to do all three.
Thats Apple's moat. And when mortal dev shops bump up against the
"interaction/effects/visual, pick two" bargain, interaction is often the first
one to go because it's the one that doesn't come through in a demo. And
they're relying on the parallax effects to wow their client/boss. Plus they
want to feel like they're going for the moonshot "Apple-quality" bar so their
ego can get a boost. And honestly most people stop doing interaction design
the moment they get a picture in their head of what their app could be. We
become emotionally wedded to interactions the minute we invent them. God
forbid we actually pay attention to the friction in our users' lives and put
those things at the top of our prioritized lists.

I think we need a return to boring, native-to-the-web software with superb
interaction design. And sacrifice pretty fonts and sacrifice 3d parllax
effects and sacrifice animation, except where it is truly impacting
comprehensibility (and not just feel).

That's the basket my eggs are in.

------
dmritard96
So basically, its QRv2 without cameras and instead nfc/ble or some other
physical layer.

------
cdnsteve
Meh, we need AI to understand API interfaces automatically and can communicate
together seamlessly, without any hard coding. That's when device to device
integration gets REALLY interesting. Wait, isn't this just bluetooth + web?

~~~
mcrider
We don't necessarily need AI, we just need APIs to be standardized so
everything knows how to interface with them. This is IMO the killer app for
the Semantic Web (I just wrote an article on this:
[https://medium.com/@mcriddy/semantic-web-
design-92ef35f66c9f](https://medium.com/@mcriddy/semantic-web-
design-92ef35f66c9f)).

~~~
MichaelGG
How does that eliminate the need for AI? Having a "standardized" format
doesn't fix much of anything, except a bit of search engine display logic. It
does nothing of the sort of eliminating the need for render code per app/site.
Maybe some actual, solid, examples of exactly what a "standard API" would
accomplish would help explain.

------
AndrewKemendo
The way I see it, this is better implemented with AR and CV using specific
items as "markers" than with a "nearby lookup" table. The thing you want may
be across a highway and still be near making the listing somewhat imprecise.

The range of interactions is also greater with AR, as it gives the ability to
be triggered (eg. highlighted) just by looking at it with the AR camera.

------
talles
Reading the page, the comments here and all... I can't stop thinking _Firefox
OS_... just... can't...

~~~
fiatjaf
I really don't understand why people aren't agreeing that "native" apps are a
thing of the pre-internet era.

------
edhebert
The project's ethos is very similar to Rob Pike's 'dream setup' that he
describes in his usesthis interview,
[http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/](http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/)

------
CmonDev
Well, as long as I don't have to use HTML and JavaScript.

------
spullara
Looks like yet another vector mostly for local advertising.

------
danielcgold
So many typos in the open PRs right now.

------
sp332
Obligatory [http://xkcd.com/1367/](http://xkcd.com/1367/) I'm not saying we
can't do better than web apps, but even web apps are better at this than
native apps.

~~~
reacweb
Just put QR codes everywhere.

~~~
timinman
[http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/](http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/)

~~~
patkai
It is funny, but I would argue that the reason people don't use QR codes is
that they haven't yet gotten enough value out of them. When there will be an
incentive to scan those codes suddenly everyone will be using them.

