Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual World

The link between corresponding physical and virtual worlds has been the subject of research for many years now. The instantiation of this link was often a complex task that involved special purpose techniques to identify and search for the virtual information that belongs to a selected physical object. It is since the conception of physical tagging technologies such as RFID that physical objects can carry their own virtual information. In this paper we show a simple yet effective approach to extract the virtual information of physical objects and aggregate it in a sensible way for the user. We rely on Web 2.0 techniques to accomplish this. A useful side-effect of our approach is the fact that a set or mashup of physical objects leads to a mashup of their related information in the virtual world.