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In order to deliver a foundation for orientation and decisions in the growing field of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), this chapter intends to deliver a realistic picture about MAR, where it comes from, where it currently stands, and where it is going. It distinguishes between the variants of MAR, explains their similarities, differences, and different development stages and outlooks. While describing potential application fields and their current limitations, the opportunities and challenges of MAR become obvious, as well as how much work is still to do. The chapter intends to categorize the challenges for MAR, covering also related issues in the mobile hardware, software, and operator industry, and their efforts in standardization and open interfacing. Besides the technology-driven discussion, a strong emphasis will be taken also to the essential aspect of user experience. With ubiquitous MAR, the technology will become more and more secondary, and the user and her individual context moves into the center of attention.

This chapter discusses the topic security in standard based virtual worlds with emphasis on X3D as the international ISO/IEC standard for Virtual Worlds. The general security challenges in persistent and economic virtual environments are addressed as well as the importance of standardization and security as the two key success factors for reliable, cost-effective and long-term attractive Virtual World (VW) platforms. Different actual standardization approaches are opposed to the established X3D format that follows a clear security standardization path. Based on the Internet standard XML the specific advantages of X3D are emphasized, like seamless integration into Web applications and deployment of generic XML tools. The generation of encrypted and signed X3D binary files is demonstrated according to the XML Security Recommendation of the W3C consortium. In a practical session the appliance of security approaches to concrete X3D implementation projects is described from the perspective of Bitmanagement (Bitmanagement, 2009), a market leader for interactive Web3D graphics software.

This chapter discusses the topic of standards for Virtual Worlds with emphasis on their usability as a stable and reliable basis for long-term investments into 3D-E-Commerce. The text explains why standards are important for the success of Virtual Worlds as well as the business in these shared online 3D environments, and what the relevant criteria are to decide for the right technology and/or provider. Although sometimes in the shadow of popular proprietary platforms there are already many different candidates for a Virtual World standard, currently in different states of development. By choosing a 3D platform, E-Commerce providers will decide about their business potential and at the same time strengthen one or another standard in the current technical competition phase. So it is important to get an overview about the current approaches, their advantages and disadvantages as well as the tendencies for the future developments. In this chapter the reader will be sensitized for the issues of standardization, compatibility and interoperability of Virtual Worlds for successful E-Commerce applications. An overview about the current approaches supports the orientation and decision for the different technologies. Some concrete XML-based code examples realized in the international ISO standard for interactive 3D-Graphics X3D demonstrates the practical deployment of highly compatible concepts. An outlook to the further integration of interactive 3D graphics into the Next Generation Web respectively the 3D Internet completes the overview.