Augmented Experience

Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an award-winning writer with over a decade of experience in Indian IT. Before becoming a journalist, he had been a hands-on IT specialist, with expertise in setting up IP-WANs. Reach him at gunjan_trivedi@idgindia.com

This is a great opportunity for early-adopters to take AR off the back burner even before it matures and presents itself as an important technology for businesses to favorably consider.

In 1977, the President, Chairman and Founder of DEC, Ken Olsen said, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their homes.”

I am no Olsen. Nor am I even attempting to brand myself in that league. But I still had a similar doubt when I began hearing a few years ago about this extended concept of amalgamating virtual information with a real world image seen through camera lens. They called it Augmented Reality (AR). In fact, despite AR going through sine curve on its hype cycle, especially due to the Google Glass project, the jury is still out on its uses and misuses.

Going beyond the initial wow factor and its clear impact on end-user information consumption, I too had no practical reasons to believe that any IT leader would have its use at an enterprise for any productive or commercial purpose, especially from the Indian corporate context.

Until early this year.

At one of our events, the CIO of Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs, Sri Karumbati showcased his experiments with AR and changed my equation with this concept of mixing visualization with imagination.

Karumbati demonstrated the practical uses of AR that he had proposed his organization to adopt, using a suite of applications his team had developed. He seamlessly went from running the full contextual 3D walk-throughs for buildings under-construction on his laptop, to using any image being ‘seen’ through his tablet as a base marker for a 3D, and interactive image of a vehicle. He also used the same tablet to display the required information as soon as the device looked at a car engine. He mentioned that such AR applications are being considered visual reference points in various production, designing, and training environments. Evidently, this 40-minute session piqued the imagination of the CIOs assembled, and soon, we were all talking shop in terms of the enterprise-level application of AR in the real world. And, that’s where the conversations got their own lives.

As a matter of fact, it seems that a few organizations have already begun reaping its benefits. Editor of Cutter Benchmark Review, Dr. Joseph Feller shares a few success stories on his blog. He mentions that over the past few years, leading toy manufacturer Lego has rolled out interactive AR kiosks with a monitor and camera at a number of retail outlets. When customers hold up a Lego box set to the kiosk’s camera, a 3D image of the completed model built using the box set’s parts appears, along with a live video of the customer holding the box. Rotating the box allows the customer to view the model from different angles. The kiosks not just allows customers  to look inside the box, but also envision the potential use of the product. Reports suggest Lego experienced 15 percent increase in sales with this tool.

AR promises to increase the collaborative effectiveness as teams can view and manipulate a single set of data. Imagine scanning a project room’s door to get real-timeupdate on a particular project’s status, rather than disrupting the work going on inside by popping in and asking about it—or adding yet another message to the project manager’s inbox. Or imagine scanning a physical document to drill into the reference material behind it, generating a digital version of the document highlighting changes since the last revision, or calling up contact information and a real-time calendar for the document’s author, Feller states.

In fact, media reports suggest that companies like Gravity Jack have developed an indoor AR office, which could be accessed from the cloud. This elevates BYOD to an entirely different level.

If you realize, this is not entirely a new technology. Just as RFID, NFC, QR codes and other such technologies, AR seems to be experiencing spikes in its practical applicationsfor quite a few years and is yet to take off in full swing.

In my opinion, this is a great opportunity for early-adopters to take AR off the back burner even before it matures and presents itself as an important technology for businesses to favorably consider. But not before CIOs can articulate a convincing answer to the question that an engineer at IBM had posed on seeing a microchip in 1968: “But …what is it good for?”

Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an award-winning writer with over a decade of experience in Indian IT. Before becoming a journalist, he had been a hands-on IT specialist, with expertise in setting up IP-WANs. Reach him at gunjan_trivedi@idgindia.com