Augmented Reality - my experience and understanding
Augmented Reality is an engaging new way of bringing the available digital information into the real world, by visualizing it using either wearable device such as AR glasses, or via the camera of any smart phone.
Looking at the real world, AR apps use the camera from such devices to detect and recognize the objects from the physical world and it overlaps on them contextually aware and personalized information (or even objects) from the digital world.
One example are Microsoft Hololens Mixt Reality glasses which can be used in remote assistance applications (picture 1).
World Economic Forum plays this technology on the map of Industry 4.0 technological landscape and lots of computer science researchers agree that augmented reality is tomorrow’s way for visualizing data. Mike Pell explains beautifully in his new book, The Age of Smart Information, how data should be brought to life, how tons of data that we currently have is useless as we have it nowadays.
I just came out from Innovation Days, an event we organize once per year in Metro Systems, in which we explore innovative solutions for Metro Cash & Carry wholesale group. I was very happy to see that 2 out of the 14 participating teams proposed solutions based on AR, meaning more and more professionals are aware of this trend.
Being part of a team that studied quite carefully augmented reality in the last year, I would say that, if you want to build an AR solution, you have to consider:
- AR glasses: there are plenty of articles about this type of devices, choose whatever fits your use-case and your budget. For us, at least for the moment, Vuzix Blade seems like a fit option.
Nevertheless, I would say the producers of such devices still have a lot of work to do with regards to both hardware (camera, battery, design) and operating system (we want speech and gestures recognition!).
2. Computer vision: the objects from the real world must be recognized using this Artificial Intelligence field. We have explored so far Google Auto ML Vision, Google Vision API (which is actually a pre-trained version of AutoML for plenty of generic labels) and Vuforia Engine.
3. Data: what data do you want to visualize, where to get it from, how to aggregate it and make it relevant to the user, how to make it contextually-aware? These are questions that may generate a real futuristic AR app that will change lives or… just a piece of software. This of course goes hand in hand with data science.
4. 3D modelling: in case your app needs 3D objects, then programmers alone can make it happen. You need other professionals as well, such as digital artists.
5. Use-cases: yes, technology is cool, “touching” digital artifacts in the real world is awesome indeed, but this has to serve other purposes in business such as making work easier, faster and why not more playful.
Just thinking about these 5 perspectives, I realize that tomorrow’s expected applications require even stronger collaboration between different minds, expertise and teams.
Talking about use-cases we have explored following use-cases for Metro Cash & Carry business:
- from customer perspective: mobile AR app, which would show personalized information to the customer about ingredients, discounts or other products related master data that is of interest to the customer.
- from employees perspective: AR glasses app that would support them in identifying which products are inside big boxes, where should they be placed inside the store, help them make easy and fast replenishment.
How do you feel about Augmented Reality? What experience do you have in this technological field? I am happy to further discuss with you about the topic on LinkedIn.
