A few days ago we were looking at
Augmented Reality (AR) and thinking about the potential of the emerging early plays, and how most of the ideas were old* (how many times has the "find a great restaurant in the neighborhood that you can visit" use case been used to flog dodgy mobile apps in the last 10 years?), but the combination of smart phone and big, cheap(er) bandwidth has now changed the dynamic. However, one curious thing struck us - there was virtually nothing in the literature about Augmented Reality for Enterprises (most under that term in Google are Star Trek based, and the most prominent article searched under "Augmented Reality for Business" was written in 2001, for example.
Anyway, what followed was a bit of mental freewheeling which I thought I'd put down here, to get others' creative thoughts flowing. So, in some semblance of an order:
Why AR Now?
Combination of the penetration of increasingly smart phones with various types of sensor (GPS, Camera, motion detection etc) plus good coverage of high bandwidth at increasingly affordable costs drives a "tipping point". Potentially.
Why AR for Enterprises?
Enterprise AR already exists in early forms - the Helpdesk person who has access to a lot of supplementary customer data is using an early form of AR. Some field service apps have online access to extra data. Also, RFID sensors and suchlike have been "augmenting" the ERP and CRM systems' data for some time.
Consumer AR seems to be purely mobile based - is this how Enterprise will go?
No, and its probably not even how consumer service AR will go, for 2 reasons:
- AR is not purely about mobile phones: Laptop ownership is still high compared with smartphones, and netbook ownership is rising fast. The mobile screen still has a tiny real estate, so risks AR clutter (and thus massively reduced utility) very quickly. Netbooks, Tablets and even smarter e-Readers are potentially powerful platforms for AR applications
- AR is not purely about physical location: The "great restaurant" use case is a mental trap. Enterprises have huge ecosystems all of their own, partly physical (in office) and partly structural (who is doing what) - much of this data could be used to "augment" reality. (There is an amusing piece in Pattie Maes' TED demo of Sixth Sense where it projects the data about a person onto their T shirt for the device user to read )
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Where will early Enterprise AR applications be used?
Early applications of similar types of technology have in the past been deployed first among staff away from the office - salesmen, drivers/deliverymen and field service staff. Next up has typically been staff requiring data but not at a desk - shop floor, warehouse, front of house etc. One could also imagine "reverse AR" devices which are more dedicated to picking up AR data in other companies' sites when one is visiting them.
What about RFID?
RFID will be a key component of Enterprise AR as a lot of the AR will probably be about taking and interpreting data from RFID systeme (and other simpler forms like Bar Codes). This could be one of the main differences between Enterprise and Consumer AR, in that consumers by and large won't deploy RFID infrastructure (though we can imagine businesses that will, specifically to feed consumer AR data applications)
What's the Business Case?
As with all information handling tools, a combination of faster/better information has a number of knock on impacts, typically around:
- Better customer acquisition
- Potentially, better knowledge allows better upselling
- More effective/timely service and help reduces dissatisfaction and churn
- Operating cost reduction via higher labour productivity' less waste (lean operations) etc
Which Industries will deploy early?
Probably those with large numbers of staff outside the office, and where the responsibility / value of those people "getting things right" is high. Also, potentially very large enterprises where it is impossible to meet everybody in the normal course of events.
What sorts of systems will be deployed?
Probably a combination of systems with new and useful metadata in them, plus ones with interfaces to older company systems that extract and re-present the existing data in more usable ways. These new systems will have to be partly online and near real-time to be most useful. One of the issues will be security as multiple formats and data sources will need to be accessed (unless the whole service is a walled garden) so we would expect layered apps with various levels of access
How does this square with Enterprise 2.0?
To us, Enterprise 2.0 thinking at the moment seems to be taken up too much with the social network aspect of Web 2.0, and the other vectors have been largely ignored. This is more part of "Olde 2.0" - about getting useful data collated above a single device rapidly to the point of use. At the moment, most "Enterprise 2.0" implementation is of blogs, wikis and social media front ends - these will be datastreams into the AR, but will need judicious filtering. (In fact we predict that filtering will be a major growth technology in enterprise and consumer AR)
*Most of the AR apps emerging today existed in some form 10 years ago at MIT and other R&D labs around the world. What has changed is the application of Moore's Law over 10 years and rational data pricing behaviour by mobile companies
