ar – Looking Forward

May 9, 2017

Augmented Reality Rising

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Premier CIO Summit in Connecticut on the Future of User Interaction With Technology, especially the combined effects of developments in communicating without a keyboard, augmented reality (AR) and machine learning. I’ve been interested in this for some time and have written about AR as part of the Wearables movement and what I call EyeTech.

First, it would help to distinguish these digital realities. In virtual reality, a person is placed in a completely virtual world, eyes fully covered by a VR headset – it’s 100% digital immersion. It is ideal for games, space exploration, and movies, among other yet to be created uses.

With augmented reality, there is a digital layer that is added onto the real physical world. People look through a device – a smartphone, special glasses and the like – that still lets them see the real things in front of them.

Some experts make a further distinction by talking about mixed reality in which that digital layer enables people to control things in the physical environment. But again, people can still see and navigate through that physical environment.

When augmented was first made possible, especially with smartphones, there were a variety of interesting but not widespread uses. A good example is the way that some locations could show the history of what happened in a building a long time ago, so-called “thick-mapping”.

There were business cards that could popup an introduction and a variety of ancillary information that can’t fit on a card, as in this video.

There were online catalogs that enabled consumers to see how a product would fit in their homes. These videos from Augment and Ikea are good examples of what’s been done in AR.

A few years later, now, this audience was very interested in learning about and seeing what’s going on with augmented reality. And why not? After a long time under the radar or in the shadow of Virtual Reality hype, there is an acceleration of interest in augmented (and mixed) reality.

Although it was easy to satirize the players in last year’s Pokémon Go craze, that phenomenon brought renewed attention to augmented reality via smart phones.

Just in the last couple of weeks, Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Facebook developers conference stated that he thinks augmented reality is going to have tremendous impact and he wants to build the ecosystem for it. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/technology/mark-zuckerberg-sees-augmented-reality-ecosystem-in-facebook.html

As beginning of the article puts it:

“Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building smartphones, which now underpin many people’s digital lives. Ever since, he has searched for the next frontier of modern computing and how to be a part of it from the start.

“Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras.”

And shortly before that, an industry group – UI LABS and The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA) – united to plot the direction and standards for augmented reality, especially now that the applications are taking off inside factories, warehouses and offices, as much as in the consumer market. See http://www.uilabs.org/press/manufacturers-unite-to-shape-the-future-of-augmented-reality/

Of course, HoloLens from Microsoft continues to provide all kinds of fascinating uses of augmented reality as these examples from a medical school or field service show.

Looking a bit further down the road, the trend that will make this all the more impactful for CIOs and other IT leaders is how advances in artificial intelligence (even affective computing), the Internet of Things and analytics will provide a much deeper digital layer that will truly augment reality. This then becomes part of a whole new way of interacting with and benefiting from technology.

September 14, 2016

Eye Tech

Last month, I wrote about Head Tech – technology that can be worn on the head and used to control the world about us. Most of those products act as an interface between our brain waves and devices that are managed by computers that are reading our brain waves.

The other related area of Head Tech recognizes the major role of our eyes literally as windows to the world we inhabit.

Google may have officially sidelined its Glass product, but its uses and products like it continue to be developed by a number of companies wanting to demonstrate the potential of the idea in a better way than Google did. There are dozens of examples, but, to start, consider these three.

Carl Zeiss’s Smart Optics subsidiary accomplished the difficult technical task of embedding the display in what looks to everyone like a pair of regular curved eyeglasses. Oh, and they could even be glasses that provide vision correction. Zeiss is continuing to perfect the display while trying to figure out the business challenge of bringing this to market.

You can see a video with the leader of the project at https://youtu.be/MSUqt8M0wdo and a report from this year’s CES at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX5GWjKi7fc

Also offering something that looks like regular glasses and is not a fashion no-no is LaForge Optical’s Shima, which has an embedded chip so it can display information from any app on your smartphone. It’s in pre-order now for shipment next year, but you can see what they’re offering in this video. A more popular video provides their take on the history of eye glasses.

While Epson is not striving to devise something fashionable, it is making its augmented reality glasses much lighter. This video shows the new Moverio BT-300 which is scheduled to be released in a few months.

Epson is also tying these glasses to a variety of interesting, mostly non-consumer, applications. Last week at the Interdrone Conference, they announced a partnership with one of the leading drone companies, DJI, to better integrate the visuals coming from the unmanned aerial camera with the glasses.

DAQRI is bringing to market next month an updated version of its Smart Helmet for more dangerous industrial environments, like field engineering. Because it is so much more than glasses, they can add all sorts of features, like thermal imaging. It is a high end, specialized device, and has a price to match.

At a fraction of that price, Metavision has developed and will release “soon” its second generation augmented reality headset, the Meta 2. Its CEO’s TED talk will give you a good a sense of Metavision’s ambitions with this product.

Without a headset, Augmenta has added recognition of gestures to the capabilities of glasses from companies like Epson. For example, you can press on an imaginary dial pad, as this little video demonstrates.

This reminds me a bit of the use of eye tracking from Tobii that I’ve included in presentations for the last couple of years. While Tobii also sells a set of glasses, their emphasis is on tracking where your eyes focus to determine your choices.

One of the nice things about Tobii’s work is that it is not limited to glasses. For example, their EyeX works with laptops as can be seen in this video. This is a natural extension of a gamer’s world.

Which gets us to a good question: even if they’re less geeky looking than Google’s product, why do we need to wear glasses at all? Among other companies and researchers, Sony has an answer for that – smart, technology-embedded contact lenses. But Sony also wants the contact lens to enable you to take photos and videos without any other equipment, as they hope to do with a new patent.

So we have HeadTech and EyeTech (not to mention the much longer established EarTech) and who knows what’s next!

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/150401402048/eye-tech]

June 10, 2015

Main Street Stores Need A Tech Upgrade

Many small towns wish they had a big box store of some kind as an answer to the retail needs of their residents. The owners of Main Street stores, of course, worry about big box stores. After all, Walmart grew into the colossus it is today by first serving the small town and rural market.

Then the growth of Amazon and other e-commerce companies just made things worse for bricks-and-mortar stores on Main Street.

Some stores have sought to survive by focusing on especially narrow niches or creative, quirky products. But this hasn’t been enough to replace all the retail business that has been lost.

Of course, local leaders and economic development officials just want to revive their main streets somehow – and making the stores their viable is part of that revival.

Meanwhile, the retail business is shifting and using space to create exciting and entertaining environments inside the store, rather than stocking up as much inventory as they can.

Stores in small towns need to jump ahead and aggressively adopt the new retail technology. There are some interesting examples of technology that could be used in these Main Street stores.

Adidas built a virtual wall which shows off all of their shoes, lets shoppers see them at all angles and purchase what they want, which can be delivered later. It amounts to a limitless inventory for a small store.

Using an approach several companies have taken, Ray Ban has a virtual mirror that will show how a pair of sunglasses looks on your face.

Similarly, there are variations of virtual mirrors that let you see how a particular item of clothing looks on you before you buy – or perhaps even before the store orders it from the manufacturer.

Since most small town stores can’t be open all the time, there’s always a way to allow shoppers to peek inside when the doors are closed.

Projectors are a relatively inexpensive way of blending the virtual and physical in stores. Sometimes they can be used to provide further information that a customer wants.

And store owners of all kinds realize that part of what draws people in is just an entertaining environment. So here’s another projection example that’s installed for pure fun.

Finally, there’s nothing to stop a retailer with unique products – like art works – from taking pictures and putting those on the Internet for customers to see, both local and potentially worldwide customers.

Indeed, the retailers in small towns should take advantage of their greater agility than the big store chain behemoths. That’s the way they will succeed and, in the process, help make Main Street more exciting to visit.

The lesson here is the same as for small towns and rural communities in general – the intelligent use of information and communications technologies can help them flourish in this century. The impact, indeed, will be much stronger and more visible than it is in big cities.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/121188673865/main-street-stores-need-a-tech-upgrade]