“Opening a new dimension for data analysis”
How AR/MR will become the next challenge for enterprise software.
I began my career as an Industrial Designer, so I have always had a special appreciation for objects.
When I joined IBM as a UX designer, it was very natural for me to think about new ways to visualize information. If only we had the ability to manipulate data just as we do with 3D objects. I remembered wanting to take a piece of information and move it around, analyze it from all sides, dissect it and get the answer of all my questions.
So I start exploring that idea.
With this in mind, I began exploring both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Virtual Reality is without a doubt a very promising field. The ability to make a person feel completely immersed in an environment makes this technology ideal for gaming, theme parks and film industry. When you are developing for an enterprise application, you need to be aware of who is actually going to use your product and how is that person going to interact with it. You also need to question how long a person might use your application, or what other “real” or “virtual” tools are they going to use.
Take the example of a data scientist. He or she might spend more than eight hours sitting at their desk. They work with multiple monitors, and they need to be constantly shifting screens. When you are performing a task like that, it is important to provide the right ergonomics. We like to be aware of our surroundings. We feel more comfortable knowing where are our things and the people around us. Because of that, our physical objects play a very important task for our workflow. We don’t want to be lost in the space; we want to keep our feet on the ground.
George Donale in his paper of Immersive and Collaborative Data Visualization, said: “We are biologically optimized to see the world and the patterns in it in 3 dimensions. The more dimensions we can visualize effectively, the higher are our chances of recognizing potentially interesting patterns, correlations, or outliers”
With Augmented Reality(AR) and Mix Reality(MR) the experience is different. Even though the technology is still young, AR/MR gives us the opportunity of being aware of your real environment and the people around you, plus “augmenting” your view with virtual assets. By adding that extra dimension to our data, we can take a “piece” of information and manipulate it in a way we couldn’t do it in the past. We will be able to make comparisons and detect interesting pieces by the first glance. AR will help us accelerate the way we analyze and manipulate information. This will help us get deeper connections and better insights in a smaller period of time.
I predict a world where people will work using AR as part of their routine, mixing the real and the virtual and using those tools to expand their horizon. People will be able to literally play with data and manipulate it as they do with “Play-Doh”, creating beautiful insights that will generate great impact in many different industries.
And most important, keep a humanized environment that blends both realities and help us do greater things in the years to come.
There is a new challenge for enterprise software and it involves AR/MR, the future is now people!
