Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality for the Enterprise – SAP Employee Unveils Prototype
SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it’s a prototype, not a supported product. It’s not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like. Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.
The app prototype enables users to mashup location information with any sort of corporate data available in an enterprise’s BusinessObjects OnDemand account. The use case Elliot demonstrates is locating the nearest customers and displaying supplemental information.
Mashing up location data with CRM data has obvious, if limited, benefit – but what other sorts of uses are possible? The current limitation of the app is the precision of location based services. Elliot’s previous mock-ups presented some extremely interesting use cases that would require considerably greater precision:
Imagine pointing a smart phone at a piece of equipment or merchandise and pulling up information about it from an ERP system, and being able to update that information from the same interface.
What could really be useful for enterprises is the intersection of augmented reality with the Internet of Things. Google Goggles can already recognize objects (and people), but what sort of use cases would open up if an AR app could identify individual objects and communicate with the objects themselves?
Written by Klint Finley / July 27, 2010 / ReadWrite Enterprise
8 Unique mobile abilities
- Personal mass medium
- Permanently connected
- Always carried
- Built in payment channel
- Available at creative impulse
- Has most accurate audience
- Captures social context
- Enables augmented reality
A dedicated device for augmented reality
QderoPateo is attempting to make an end-to-end platform for augmented reality. That includes building and releasing its own phone chipset, hardware and operating system, as well as APIs, applications, advertising sales and an AR industry consortium.
But AR needs a lot of work still. John du Pre Gauntt, from GigaOm speaks to the technical and business challenges and opportunities ahead for consumer AR apps. They include:
Pinpointing Geo: Today’s AR apps depend mostly on location information, but location data is only accurate to 10-20 meters. The most pressing priority, says du Pre Gauntt, is to make geolocation data more granular and optimized. And mobile social networking apps could actually help us get to a mapped globe quicker, writes du Pre Gauntt. “Foursquare and Gowalla have the potential to be foot soldiers for geotagging the world.”
Opening Eyes: The next area of development will be image recognition, something Google is working on with Google Goggles and Nokia with Point and Find. These early systems are often out of their element unless they can depend on scanning formal markers like barcodes. But a barcode experience tends to take the user out of the lens of AR to bring them to a web site or another resource.
The Apple Roadblock: Though AR developers have begged for access, Apple has a lock on the iPhone’s video feed API. As du Pre Gauntt puts it, “Without a public API to access live video in real time from the iPhone’s camera, it is impossible to do effective image analysis of the object in front.” This barrier could foretell an Apple push to innovate image recognition on its own, or it could mean that more open platforms (aka every other smartphone) are able to harness developer enthusiasm to get ahead.
Teaming Up: The hybrid nature of AR means it’s ripe for cooperation. Diving into today’s major AR app categories of navigation, location overlays, geo-information services, and gaming, du Pre Gauntt finds companies like Mobilizy and Lonely Planet, and Layar and Zehnder collaborating on some very cool travel and event apps. But cooperation seems to only make things more complicated; the implementations require both an AR browser and an app or a separately purchased guide.
Yelp’s augmented reality app
Some pretty cool technology that quite frankly I’m surprised was able to sneak past Apple. I’ve seen a lot of AR stuff strictly for marketing functions, but this is great example of how AR lends itself to more everyday funtionality.
7 Augmented reality categories
Augmented reality categories
- location based search
- mobile games
- multimedia & entertainment
- lifestyle & healthcare
- education & reference
- social networking
- enterprise.
