When a mobile AR browser pans around a town square, it’s not discovering the content as it pans - the data doesn’t reside in that geographical location. You, or your application, have selected one or more data sources that refer to that place, and will render the relevant data when the view is appropriate.
With this in mind, why do people assert that spam is going to be a big problem for AR? I think the “AR browser” metaphor is partly to blame. You “visit” locations, similarly to visiting pages, and the browser will render the additional content there. It’s easy to extend the metaphor and expect spam. But really, if you’ve chosen a set of trustworthy mobile AR content providers - Google, Yelp, your favourite local AR art collectives - from where does the spam come? For me, the RSS Reader is a much better metaphor - you choose your content providers, they quietly push new data to you as it arrives, and you can subscribe and unsubscribe as you please.
There’s a dark future were we decide to opt in to spam (for a monetary return):
That’s quite the dystopia.
