Quartz

Augmented reality browsers use a mobile phone’s camera to digest a scene and annotate it with web-connected flair: live directions, geotagged tweets, reviews that hover over restaurants.

But the current generation of AR browsers is lagging on geolocation, are content-poor, and have limited interactivity, according to a recent paper (paywall) in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Geographic certitude is at the core of everything an AR browser does. Seamless AR browsing has to integrate sensor data from GPS (location); body direction (compass); and pose, or where the device is pointed (gyroscope and accelerometer). The Austrian team says that the current level of consumer-grade hardware can’t deliver all of this accurately, and that future AR browsers can overcome this by being more clever about the way they use computational resources.

There was no breakout mobile app, no hot new startup, no celebrity founder holding court over the conference. But everywhere one turned at South By Southwest Interactive, people were talking about television.

Time Warner’s HBO had a much larger presence than previous years, including the most acclaimed and widely discussed exhibit at the conference. Media executives on one panel grumbled about web authentication systems for TV subscribers.

Jimmy Kimmel sniffed, “The fact of the matter is, the amount of money we make from selling commercials on television, is 100 times as much from what we make from people watching our YouTube videos. And until those things even out somewhat, we’re going to be focused on television.”