Augmented Reality as the Bearer of Metadata

Various mediums have tried to reconcile communication and content.  It would be hard to imagine doing business (or barter as the case may be) without any one of them shortly after they came available – speech, writing, the printing press, telegraph, telephone, telephone, television, satellite, cable, cellular, internet, wi-fi, wireless.  Looking at this context, I contend that the list is not static. 

Augmented reality (AR) is the mashup of reality with (if you’ll allow, I’ll call it…) metadata, and I see it as a contender for the above list circa next decade.  AR has already made inroads into our personal space with software and games, as I will demonstrate, but increasingly is improving enterprise operations and eventually has a place in business intelligence and data modeling.

If you watched the Super Bowl this week, you had a taste of augmented reality.  The yellow first down line you see on television is not really there.  OK, you know that, but once we label and extrapolate that idea, we can see that it is a variation of many other forms of augmented reality in our life.  Today.  And many of the television ads (for some reason, for cars) demonstrate some fake, but not too far off, augmented reality. 

Whether you indulge in the gaming industry or not, it is a great place to look to for a hint of the future and that future looks like AR.  Men on the virtual battlefield or in the storyline have their name and other pertinent metadata “hovering” over them. 

iPhone Applications like iPew allow you to virtually zap or burn your surroundings, taking out some aggressions safely perhaps.  I understand it’s a popular application during my seminars.

The education market has a lot of potential for using AR.  It is easier to learn in context and by “seeing” rather than reading.  And we need to “educate” our users of business intelligence using the most effective means.  Enter AR.

Setting up my telescope a few years ago proved to be a challenge.  I eventually gave up on the calibration part and would just use books to put context to the sky and then the telescope - sans the Finder - to zoom in on interesting objects.  The setup took away from the enjoyment.  Now, with Pocket Universe on my iPhone, I just point at the sky and understand it immediately. 

Museums and city centers may soon have safer and more enjoyable experiences once patrons are able to easily access customizable metadata in real-time.  I’ve often also thought AR could facilitate meeting people if metadata were hovering over them.   Some conferences I’ve attended have attempted to do this with color-coded stickers on the badges representing categories of interest.

Pocket Universe represents a dramatic new wave of application capability.  It’s location intelligence, but more than that, it’s Augmented Reality.  It’s the mashup of a simple, known reality, such as a building or an expanse of the sky, with metadata.  Largely today, that metadata is groupsourced. 

If you shake the iPhone Yelp application 3 times, you unlock “monocle mode” which superimposes Yelp summaries of surrounding venues that appear in the direction the camera is facing.  It’s a fascinating new user interface that is applicable to an enterprise whenever multiple layers of information are applicable to the worker.  Google Goggles is also an interesting quasi-AR application that brings metadata (mostly internet references) to bear on interesting surroundings, although not in real-time.

Crowdsourcing is underutilized in enterprises today, but perhaps a vessel such as AR is needed for its display.  Once the metadata can be validated and instantly displayed, knowledge workers are more likely to contribute metadata.  Validation can comprise a trust factor of the contributor and also a codification of the content.  Metadata is vastly underpopulated and utilized in enterprises today and AR could be the mechanism to finally unlock its potential. 

Crowdsourcing is but one trend maturing these days that will help enterprises with AR.  Some other examples are mobile devices with location intelligence, social media and yes, the predominance of 3D movies that are making us accustomed to augmenting our bodies to access other information.  Workerscould wear devices to help them with their responsibilities.

At Daimler, employees wear headsets that display metadata in the part warehouse.  The metadata helps them quickly and accurately pick the correct parts for the engines being built.

A modeler or an end user should not have to be physically proximate to the actual hardware to utilize the AR UI to understand a system he is accessing, sourcing data from, remodeling or extending the model for.  There are a number of ways that the system could be abstracted – with surrogate physical objects, a  representation on a screen which virtually takes you there or a “live look” through a webcam.

Using a basis of augmented reality, “wearable IT”, and groupsourcing, techniques may eventually be formed to tie into our sensory system and surface queries and obtain answers – and the unintended consequences.   The opportunity exists today for business intelligence to utilize the new communication techniques.