50 years strong, the consumer electronics show is the yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas to see the greatest and latest technology from vendors as far as South East Asia and as near as California. It’s interesting that a decade ago, TV screens were considered the greatest consumer technology and walking the floor this year you can see how much that has changed.
Fitness and tracking technology is huge, smart and connected homes are everywhere, sound technology is amazing, the robots are truly here, drones are now big enough to “self-Uber” me around but for me it was the Augmented and Virtual Reality stuff that thoroughly caught my attention.
If you work in the enterprise space you would have come to terms that most businesses and industries are going through a digital transformation — how do they transform their business to take advantage of mobile, cloud and the Internet of Things. However, if you look closely you will also notice that “Consumers” seem to have adopted this and are driving this digital transformation. So yes, today the consumer space is driving what will happen in the enterprise.
This trend has been happening for several years now;
BYOD — a term used to describe workers bringing their own devices to work — why cause the experience on their own device was significantly better than what the enterprise offered them.
Collaboration Tools — a recognition that multiple users need to access information on the go and from anywhere — an approach that we all us socially in our everyday lives.
So, I arrived at CES trying to find that technology that could quickly mean something to the enterprise and help push the digital transformation agenda.
Augmented Reality — Like the name implies, it is a view where real-life environment is supplemented by computer generated sensory input such as video, graphics or even GPS data. A significant number of the applications at CES were targeted at education, gaming and hospitality. I however found it interesting how easy it was to use, the level of data and context that could easily be added to a view meant you can provider a user with a vast amount of information in a very compelling way. In addition, the ease of use meant the adoption will take very minimal effort on the part of the user. Having said that the use of a head mounted display (HMD) in some application means it will limit its use to limited scenarios.
Waypoint — a group of Harvard and MIT students who won the AT&T AR/VR competition had a compelling use case in healthcare for prescription picking. I tested it out and it absolutely helped me improve my picking accuracy and the time spent and I can see multiple uses in picking uses-case be it healthcare or retail or supply chain. I however get the feeling it will be initially suited for training, if HMD’s remain required.
Octagon — This was a very interesting solution that used flashcards to display AR experiences using a regular device such as a mobile phone or tablet running a 4D application. I liked the simplicity of it and the fact you can engage with it using devices that already exist out there today. The moment I sampled it I could immediately think of retail showing experiences.
Retail brick and mortar is going through a transformation as well and I expect to see more of them becoming experiential in nature with a focus on not just selling to the customer but educating the customer. Am in the process of getting a new winter jacket and I would love to walk into a store and use AR to understand the materials and components my jacket is made off. To me it just feels like a better way to learn about a product and this can be extended to food products where the flashcard allows me to see several interactive cooking styles and options.
Virtual Reality — Here, you are taking into another world, a completely virtual space where you can either view content or interact with it. I totally get the limitation on the time of use warning as you quickly find yourself loosing orientation of where you are. This mainly requires a HMD which again limits its mass application and use. The bulk of the use cases on display were gaming and entertainment and that made a lot of sense to me.
3D Rubber — This is a foot VR controller and one that allows you to use your feet to move in a virtual world, I immediately thought of healthcare use-cases where it completely immense a patient into a world beyond their sick bed or chair and allows them use their feet to move within the world.
The killer application for VR in enterprise is probably a while away but it makes sense to consider it a training mechanism as well as a medium to test out hypothesis. One of the key goals in the enterprise today is making better decisions and this is partly due to the fact we are capturing a significant amount of data and analyzing this data accurately and in real-time enables better decisions. With VR can we start plugging the data/information captured into algorithms that could help paint a picture of what the various outcomes will generate.
There is a lot of work to still be done here but think of it as using real-time data to create virtual context that can create a visual of what might potentially happen.
Next stop — NRF and it would be interesting to see who is showing AR/VR in a retail context and the use cases.
