Augmented reality for business – present and future use cases from Metaio
Is augmented reality for business ready for prime time? Or is it just an excuse to get executives to try on goofy googles on the trade show floor?
At this year's Mobile World Congress, I challenged the team at Metaio to define augmented reality use cases. But there was a catch: I wanted a distinction between which are ready for prime time now, and what's still in the future.
With that in mind, Jack Dashwood, Senior PR and Marketing Manager, was a good enough sport to run me through a smart phone video walk through. We looked at one present use case, one a couple years out, and one that is at least five years ahead.
Here's the informal augmented reality use case video tour:
Dashwood started with a look at the present - an image matching product called Metaio Visual Search, powered by a cloud-based image library. We filmed a retail use case, where a shopper would grab a product, scan it on their iPad, and the image library will recognize the packaging and give the shopper information about the products:
This shopping scenario would come in handy if you have set up preferences such as gluten-free or nut allergies. Once a product was scanned, it would track against your preferences and alert you to any nutritional issues. As Dashwood explained:
You can put those preferences in your personal profile. You basically let the device do the mental arithmetic for you. You've got this super smart device, with a really powerful chip inside it in your pocket. Let that worry about your dietary requirements, and you can just get on with shopping.
The use cases for image matching go beyond retail - basically any scenario where image recognition would have business value - be it DVDs, paintings or product packaging.
Next up we have a scenario from the near future - two to three years out. In this case, our shopper is at the mall, looking for that elusive parking space, perhaps with hot/unhappy kids in the back seat. The technology to assist will soon be embeddable in a smart phone. But right now it's still the size of a briefcase, as you can see:
The briefcase is an implementation of a prototype Metaio dubs the AR engine. It's a hardware optimized computer vision architecture. Currently, there are bottlenecks in computer vision where the mobile device is being overworked due to the amount of computation involved. But that will change soon: in two years, the computational power we see in the suitcase today will be a small wafer of silicon in your phone. Dashwood pointed to the small car on the table and said:
The car is basically showing us mapping of this mini shopping center here. It's extracting features. What It's recreating a three dimensional map in a system, which can then be used for things like assisting parking or autonomous driving. It's pulling a lot of data out of the camera feed, and in order to accomplish this, you need to have hardware acceleration. Our PCs and our phones, Have CPU acceleration and graphics acceleration. Now it's time for computer vision acceleration.
So, returning to our carload of hot kids, in this case you might hop out and, as Dashwood said, "let the car deal with the kids for you." Or, you deal with the kids and let the car contend with other frazzled drivers.
Then we have the far future (five years). What we see here is simply an innocuous piece of paper on the wall, with six album covers including Nirvana's Nevermind and The Beastie Boys' Check Your Head. But nothing is innocuous when thermal imaging tech gets a hold of it:
Technically speaking, this is a Metaio project called thermal touch, which combines standard computer vision with a thermal imaging camera on your smartphone. End result: turn your piece of paper into a jukebox. Dashwood:
When I touch items in the real world, my finger's going to leave some heat residue. With the thermal camera, that shows up as a fingerprint. With that fingerprint, we can say that's an interaction. This is a piece of paper today, but with thermal touch technology, that piece of paper becomes a juke box, or any other kind of intelligent use case. We're basically making the world an interactive touchscreen.
Final thoughts
I found these three demos helpful in terms of grasping what augmented reality can do now, and where the near-term limitations and possibilities lie. Of course, technology does not a business case make, and some of these use cases will need work from an ROI perspective. And, there are probably more culturally profound possibilities than the ones we looked at here.
But what did make an impression was learning that Metaio has almost 150,000 developers working with its SDK. Plenty of live use cases exist, and SAP also showed us some virtual reality products available today that involve Metaio technology. What that says about Metaio's future remains to be seen, but with that level of adoption, what we call "augmented reality" clearly has become a viable option for business looking to change their models and use data to connect with consumers in a more intimate or vivid manner.
Augmented reality is not without its downside. This article does a good job of summing up AR business risks regarding performance, subpar lighting conditions, and the need for capital investments in new gear and equipment. Not to mention lugging more portable crap that runs out of batteries! But as we see more integration of AR tech with existing technologies (iPads, smart phones), some of those risks are diminished.
As always, it comes down to a sober assessment of use cases. But it was interesting to see the AR progress made - and the near time horizon.
Bonus: I've now posted a podcast with diginomica colleague Derek du Preez, Mobile World Congress 2015 - the Enterprisey and IoT Wrap.
This is the second in a series of posts I will be doing on the standout apps I’ve seen at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. First piece: Can data-driven video fix the content relevance problem?
Image credits: all photos taken by Jon Reed.
Disclosure: diginomica has no financial relationship with Mataio. I was able to attend Mobile World Congress based on SAP funding my air travel and hotel expense, however, I set my own editorial agenda for most of the conference.