Physical Web: Chrome for Android ready to interact with the "smart world"

The open-source project Physical Web, announced by Google in late 2014, has been structured to allow more immediate interaction between smartphones and smart devices intended to be becoming more common in the emerging of the Internet of Things market the project. The basic idea is to reduce the number of apps dedicated to the management of smart devices, using a URL sent via beacon Eddystone smartphone. In this way, it is simple to control operations of the device directly from the browser can run. Another usage scenario is what allows you in a contextual view information about the places visited, are also "made smart" by the presence of the beacon.

In concrete terms, if the Web pysical model were to be adopted on a large scale, you could get close to objects such as a parking meter, a car of a car sharing service, a bus, respectively, having the option to set the duration of the standstill, book and access to the car or know the next stop, all, without resort to any specific app, simply by operating a browser.

Google actively kicked off the Web pysical tests during 2015 initially using Chrome for iOS and announced in recent hours the extent of support to the Chrome browser to Android, starting with version 49 beta. In substantive terms, after crossing for the first time and the beacon enabled Physical Web through a special notification, users can view the list of URLs, leading to smart objects or contextual information, and start the consultation activities or of interaction.

Google's "physical web" has already been used in several projects which demonstrate the potential. Are cited, for example, that produced by the Mozilla team has leveraged Physical Web to detect and control a drone through browser, use in schools, on the occasion of the exhibitions like CES, or to bring to the attention of users the content more quickly.

For the success of the project it is of course required the cooperation of developers who can configure a beacon Eddystone supported to send a specific URL through appropriate tools.