Augmented Reality - What We're In For With AR

Augmented reality is a “disruptive technology.” As a result industries and businesses must prepare to adapt to AR quickly, before those who have assimilated this technology use it to take market share. To learn what augmented reality is you can watch an example here or read about it here. Portions of this post are related to and associated with a recent article by Jack Graham which you can find here . Jack is a reputable writer and thought leader on the topic. Suggest you follow him on twitter.

I shared this clip at IHRSA and during other fitness industry event. If you’re a fitness facility, fitness education or any type of fitness or wellness content provider AR has the potential to greatly impact the industry. Watch the example below and tell me, Bryan O'Rourke, what do you think about AR ?

The Challenges of AR

If you’re walking down the street looking into augspace with your iphone, you lose your peripheral vision. Playing Spec Trek, I was having a great time until I stumbled over a pothole while chasing down an AR ghost. I almost broke my neck.

Augmented reality apps that enable public tagging of buildings leave businesses vulnerable to harassment and vandalism via augmented reality sticky notes. AR apps which perform facial recognition threaten to further erode privacy, removing anonimoty in public places.

The Positives

AR technoogy holds a great deal of promise. Better heads up display glasses, are already appearing and will give augspace even greater immediacy, freeing the user from having to pull out their phone and look through it. Gestural and wearable interfaces will let us click on an object or building in a scene and bring up information on it, or allow complex interactions with phantom objects.

Industry standards for tagging places and objects with AR content will allow apps to access public AR channels. And educational AR apps capable of recognizing parts in a machine from the scene in the user’s camera could be used to coach workers through assembling and maintaining complex devices.

Emergent AR Technologies

Two research projects producing results are MIT’s SixthSense and a project at Cambridge University to create positional tracking for camera-based apps. SixthSense (watch it here) is particularly interesting because it’s in the small class of working AR applications that don’t display their output on a device monitor of some type.

Implications for AR in the Future

Soon we’ll see the emergence of open standards for building and tagging augspace, search engines selling premium AR placement, location based AR audio, and spam (along with spam filters). Farther out, augmented reality will completely transform how we compute. It will allow us to put a user-defined skin on reality, radiate and interact with personal area social networks, and wear graphics like clothing. It will enhance our intelligence, providing instant information on anything we look at and cueing us if we forget a name or a face. It will erase the boundary between the real and the digital, turning the world around us into a search engine whose results are displayed on thin air.

Merger of Physical & Digital World Continues

Vuzix makes a variety of video eyewear that enables users to view video content up close and personal. The company recently debuted a new piece of vision wear that allows augmented reality functionality. The new wrap 920AR eyewear overlays information over video of what the user is looking at while wearing the device. This new form of continuous AR will have even more applications.

This device uses stereo cameras to capture the video and gives the user a 67 inch display when seen
from 10 feet away. The company will begin selling the new device later this year and will also offer the
AR functionality as an add on to their existing video eyewear designs. The merger of the physical and digital worlds continues.


Organizations & Social Media in 2010

Where is social media headed? Its a common question posed by businesses leaders I speak with who want to know how they can prepare for the future. Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group recommends that businesses start by understanding what is happening today. See his video below.

Many brands and organizations are struggling to be effective with SM despite its rapid growth. Businesses have to learn what consumers are doing now in order to be successful going forward.

A concept that is critical is to this evaluation is that “real-time is not fast enough.” Customers are quick and organizations, no matter how big their staffs are, cannot keep up. Advocacy programs must be created to address this issue. An advocacy program is a group of customers that act as a company’s “army” and take care of problems that arise. Since many organizations already have a group of people that support them, all they have to do is enable them for the task.

Another important consideration is that consumers find corporate websites irrelevant. Businesses should, therefore, utilize platforms such as Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Twitter Connect to bring a social experience to their own website. In addition, organizations should personalize content for customers.

By keeping these points top of mind organizations can be far more effective in creating and deploying effective uses of social media to grow their business and achieve their mission.



Innovation in the Fitness & Wellness Industry

My upcoming presentation for the IHRSA event in San Deigo this March on the future of the fitness industry requires delivering some tough but exciting news for leadership. As with many industries, Fitness and Wellness requires significant innovation to reach its potential. Understanding the existing business is not nearly as important as understanding what the business of fitness and wellness will and can be. This requires huge shifts in thinking and an improved reliance on business process and IT that results in insights which help to service customers uniquely. Some convenient items related to this change are outlined in the book The New Age of Innovation. Watch the video below and read the top 5 things to keep in mind when evaluating your organization or industry in the context of innovation.

1. The consumer must be an integral part of co-creating an experience tailored to their needs;

2. All markets are experiencing the emerging centrality and empowerment of the individual;

3. Globalization and its 4 billion poor are undeniably central to the future both creatively and consumptively;

4. Talented people are essential to the innovation required to reach the potential the future offers;

5. Leadership must get their minds around business process and IT as central to strategic advantage.

More Technology Forecasts for 2010

I just can't help but share more technology forecasts for 2010, as it is January 1, 2010. Dan Grabham and the team from TechRadar put together some quality thoughts and I've included some of those and others below.

First, let's address mobile phones during 2010. "It's the beginning of the end for the featurephone, those pretty but less functional handsets," says mobile phone specialist Gareth Beavis. "It's not that the segment is dying, rather that it's re-inventing itself as part of the smartphone revolution, meaning more applications for everyone."

"Samsung's pledge to use Bada, which brings smartphone capabilities to cheaper handsets, on its lower end range shows that the soon-to-be world's biggest phone manufacturer wants to see smartphones in the hands of many more people, with the rest of the industry set to follow suit too." Think "Fortune At the Bottom of the Pyramid" , where the largest emerging markets are generating great opportunities.

Windows Mobile - Will It Get Better ?

We'll also see one of the internet's worst kept secrets confirmed: "Windows Mobile 7 will arrive during Mobile World Congress in February," says TechRadar's Editor (Reviews and Features) Paul Douglas.

"Microsoft will back down on internal marketing plans to tout it as 'the funnest phone ever' and instead advertise it with a line like 'your phone connects you to the people and programs you love', or 'your phone, simplified'. It won't feature an ad campaign that says 'I'm a phone and Windows Mobile 7 was my idea' because the idea of many Windows Mobile 6 users was to defect to Android or iPhone."

• Windows Mobile 7: all you need to know

"Leaked mock-ups suggest Microsoft has got it right, though Android 2.0 and a new iPhone in 2010 will raise the bar still higher," believes Paul. "I own a Windows Mobile phone and I've joked to my smug iPhone-toting friends that I'm holding out for Windows Mobile 9 – Android handsets are looking really compelling at the moment and I'm so starting to worry about doing just that."

Perhaps 2010 should also include the eradication of the term "phone" with respect to mobile devices, given what these devices actually do.

Google WILL have a BIG Year

While 2010 still won't be the year when Google's mobile OS ends up on handsets left, right and centre, 2010 is certain to be a huge year for Google. And not just in mobiles - Google OS will truly set the cat among the pigeons.

"We'll see a bunch of Google OS netbooks arrive in the second half of 2010 and the tech press will gasp and complain because they don't retail at a Google-We're-Not-Evil price point (ie 50 pence each)," says TechRadar's Deputy Editor Dan Grabham.

"Questions will be raised about netbooks that can't run desktop apps such as Outlook and Photoshop and there will be stories about people returning Google OS netbooks to the stores because they thought they had bought a 'real computer' and ended up with a big, bulky Twitter status updater."

Gareth believes Google OS will present "a great opportunity for cross platform functionality with a big dollop of cloud computing to boot."

But unlike Linux netbooks, which didn't exactly set the world on fire, by 2015 we'll probably all own a netbook that runs Google OS. And maybe, just maybe, we'll have found a use for Google Wave on them by then.

3D? Yes its coming, but not much of it in 2010

2010 will not see an explosion of 3D in the home according to TechRadar's Reviews Editor James Rivington. "I'm sure that many people are predicting 2010 to be a massive year for 3D. But I'd forecast the exact opposite," he explains. "I think 2010 is much more likely to be yet another year when 3D completely fails to capture the public imagination."

"Sure, 3D is starting to do well in theatres. And yes, Sky has said it will launch 3D TV for the UK as has DirecTV. But if we see even a 0.1 per cent market penetration for 3D in the HDTV market I'll be amazed. Do you really want to be wearing 3D glasses when watching TV in the evenings? I know I don't. There will be small range of 3D-ready sets to come out from the likes of LG, and a new batch of laptops with 3D screens, but we're talking about tiny quantities in the scheme of things."

• Behind the scenes with Sky 3D TV

But not everyone agrees. Although he feels like he's been saying it every year, Patrick Goss, TechRadar's Editor (News) feels like 2010 will still be a big year for 3D. "Not only will we be able to take stock of how this year's Avatar performed at the box office, says Patrick, but we can also expect a raft of 3D-capable televisions at CES and, of course, the promise of a 3D channel from Sky."

• The making of Avatar

"The broadcaster has already been busy learning how to film live sporting events (and ballet too) and we'll hopefully soon see the fruits of its labour on our TVs – and whether they can convince the public to fork out for the technology."

HD and wireless

So if not 3D, what does James think will happen in 2010 for TVs? "I think the big change for television in 2010 is much more likely to be the prevalence of HD," believes James. "There are millions of HD TVs out there now, and with the imminent launch of Freeview HD and the unprecedented success of Freesat, 2010 will definitely be the year that HD content is properly embraced by the British public. And that can only mean good things for Blu-ray, too." Maybe we'll also see some OLED sets appear too?

• 10 things you need to know about OLED

Could next year see wireless high definition coming to the fore? "2010 is going to be the year when cables become that little bit more redundant," says News Writer Marc Chacksfield. "We will see more and more TVs and other gadgets come sans wires, with Full HD images piped wirelessly through the home thanks to a recent announcement by the LLC over its wireless home standard."

"And when it comes to getting on to the web, TVs and the like are quickly doing away with unsightly Ethernet cables of yore and snapping up Wi-Fi like nobody's business," says Marc.

"Couple this with the popularity of gadgets like the Powermat, which do away the need of tethering your devices like a bad-mannered mutt, and what we'll have is a future where our gadgets go all Pinocchio on us."