Mozilla wants to put the future of Web in the hands of people around the world, as it launched an invitation for participation in the Mozilla Labs, a virtual lab where ideas take shape, giving birth to Web innovations.

The invitation is open to anyone with an idea in mind, not just to software engineers. However, Mozilla did express its particular interest in collaborating with designers who haven’t been involved in open source projects.

In order to make things easier for the participants, Mozilla created a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts that will inspire future design directions for Firefox and the Web in general, the company explained.

Among the first concepts to be unveiled was Aurora, a project that reflects the future of browsing and depicts how a future Web experience might look like in real-world contexts. Aurora was presented in a concept video created by Adaptive Path; more details and videos will be unveiled on Wednesday night at Adaptive Path’s offices in San Francisco.

“Working with Mozilla on their browser concept series gave Adaptive Path the unique opportunity to tackle a design project in the world of open source software,” said Dan Harrelson, design and technology adviser for the browser user experience.

Jesse James Garrett, lead designer, explained that Aurora is based on four essential ideas: context awareness, natural interaction, continuity and multi-user applications.

Garrett pointed out that the browser has the most potential to know much about us, as it touches every aspect of our lives, in terms of work, family, social connections, and entertainment. If a browser could take into consideration all the data flows, and the way we interact with that data, it could create patterns and adapt to our interactions with the Web, Garrett explained.

Furthermore, our interaction with the technology is simply abstract, forcing the brain to work a lot harder in order to deal with them. Aurora was designed “to leverage natural interactions whenever possible, with objects in space or those with a sense of physics to them,” Garrett said. This drove the Mozilla to tackle a core concept in Aurora: the spatial view.

Aurora was also based on the idea of continuity, as both Mozilla and Adaptive Path tried to create a single, consistent interaction model to apply to all screens, whether on desktop, handheld devices or wall-mounted devices.

Although historically speaking, the browser has always been a single-user application, Garrett explained that a browser with multi-user applications would provide a platform for the functionality we see today, which is being re-implemented and reinvented on a site-by-site basis.

The Aurora project is the result of multiple weekly design sessions, going through all the basic ideas of a browser and thinking about the possibilities that the browser of the future could bring. “This process was an invaluable tool in defining for ourselves the landscape of possibilities,” said Garrett.

Aurora was intended as the browser of the future, and is the result of the collaboration between the most innovative Web designers today. The Aurora Concept Browser is just the first project in a series that Mozilla intends to expand in time, with the collaboration and openness of the Mozilla community.