Last year, I mentioned obliquely that I had been asked to work on something very, very cool, but couldn't talk about it. Finally, I can: I joined with Adaptive Path to create a set of scenarios of the future of the Internet, used to build a model of what the future version of the web browser could look like. Adaptive Path and Mozilla have now announced that model, now dubbed Aurora, with a series of videos demonstrating its use.

Today, Adaptive Path chief Jesse James Garrett put up the original scenarios, and described a bit of the thinking.

Jamais called on a whole lot of smart people and led them (and a bunch more from both Adaptive Path and Mozilla) through a two-day workshop to forecast one possible future for browsers and the Web. Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:

• Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
• Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
• Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.

You can read the scenarios here.

They've been released under a Creative Commons license (Non-Commercial/Attribution/Share-Alike), so if the mood strikes you to play with these stories a bit, feel free.

I'll be on a panel with Jesse next week at the UX Week conference, talking about the Aurora project and the future of the web.

[Updated 10/25/11 to new location for scenarios.]