Abstract
Mixing the virtual world and the physical world seamlessly has become a phenomenal mobile service to users, providing new directions in pervasive computing. There are many variants for this mix such as Physical Annotations (PAs) and Mixed Reality (MR). There are many uses of PAs and MR such as education, entertainment, shopping, tourism and more. Many platforms have been developed to provide this service. However, there is still no standard or formal definition for PAs which aims to consolidate and extend the possibilities with PAs. The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of the Physical Annotation and to provide a formal model for it. The paper analyzes and applies the formal model to some of the existing major systems that are used for PAs. Then, we propose a generic PA system architecture and illustrate our model using a scenario concerning a shopping center.