Augmented Reality - Unleash Your Enterprise's Sixth Sense

Augmented Reality might seem like a futuristic word but the reality is it's a technology that is already available and the opportunities for the enterprise are endless. Now is the time to start thinking about how you can leverage it to better your corporation. This blog is going to give you some baseline education, some examples and ideas on how you can leverage this technology today.

First, what is it? Wikipedia defines it well but the jist is this: Augmented Reality is a combined view of the physical real-world with information from the virtual world (in most cases, the internet).

Yelp's "Monocle" functionality on the iPhone is a great practical example. It combines the iPhone's camera view, overlayed with a listing of local restaurants and bars. The information presented is based on the phone's GPS coordinates as well as it's compass reading. The short YouTube video below demonstrates this for those who haven't seen it.


Pretty cool, eh? This concept isn't unlike the yellow, First Down line we're used to seeing in NFL games. The line doesn't exist, it augments the physical view of the field based on information about the game in progress.

With the maturation of mobile devices, Augmented Reality (AR) offers additional information that you normally would not have available with your biological 5 senses. Combining a mobile device's eyes (camera), ears (microphone), location (GPS), orientation (compass), movement (accelerometer) and brain (data connection to the internet) a mobile device can provide you with essentially, a 6th sense.

And it doesn't have to be visual. The Shazam mobile application utilizes the phone's microphone (ears) and listens for music playing in the background. It then sends that information to the internet, which performs audio-recognition to determine the name of the song playing. The app then provides the user with the song title, artist, discography information and upcoming concert dates of the artist (based on your location of course).

Examples for the Enterprise

1. Now let's think of some examples for the enterprise. Let's say you're a sales representative visiting a client. As you near their building, you pull up your phone and launch your mobile AR-powered CRM app. The phone recognizes the building you are standing in front of and overlays it's view with a list of all customers who work in the building. You select your customer's name and are immediately presented with a consolidated view of relevant customer data, including recent call logs from your call center.
2. Perhaps you're heading to a meeting in your own building and the conference room you have scheduled is occupied. Do you barge in or wait it out? It really depends on who is on the other side of the door doesn't it? You pull out your phone, launch your conference room scheduling app and hold up the camera to the conference room name/number on the door. The app utilizes your phone's location and image recognition on the conference room sign, immediately presenting you with information on the current meeting taking place, including current participants. If you want to see other options, you click a button and it brings up other available conference rooms on the floor. You select one and it books your new reservation.
3. Perhaps you're in the corporate real estate group doing some location prospecting. You come upon a vacant building. Bringing up your AR-Powered Real Estate asset management application. It recognizes your location and provides you with a mash up of average lease rates/sq foot for the area, vacancy rates, demographic information about the population, etc.
4. There's a great app that already exists called RedLaser that uses the phone's camera to scan bar codes and presents the user with alternative merchants that sell the product on Google Product Search. Think about the applications for the retail industry with the availability of simple (cheap) bar code scanning functionality!

The point of AR is to be able to make decisions real-time. Historically, being on-line means you're off-life. You have to stop whatever it is you are doing and get to a computer, a computer which is incognizant of the world around you, to pull information about purchases, deals, hires, dates, etc. With AR, On-line no longer means on a computer. It means you're just "on". Imagine if you had the breadth of information available on the internet and your intranet with you all the time, everywhere you were, without a whole lot of squinty thumb typing and without any waiting. That is augmented reality.

Want some good news? It isn't that hard to build this stuff. The major smartphone's SDKs do most of the work in pulling the phone's "senses" information for you. That info combined with some open source image recognition projects, relatively commoditized OCR technology and your company's existing web services and ERP data stores, leaves only one question. What don't you want to do?

You know I love your comments. Share some ideas for the enterprise below and follow this blog. As we build these AR apps we'll be posting best practices, tips and tricks along the way.