Le prochain ISMAR se déroulera du 9 au 13 octobre prochain à Nantes. Des conférences et de rencontres de très grandes qualités sont prévues. Parmi elles, Christine Perey en animera deux. Le premier sur les outils de capture de l’environnement dans le cadre de la réalité augmentée et le second sur les obstacles actuels au déploiement de la réalité augmentée dans l’industrie. Nous sommes heureux d’avoir pu poser quelques questions à Christine sur ces deux sujets passionnants !
The next ISMAR will take place from 9 to 13 October in Nantes. Conferences and meetings of very high quality are planned. Among them, Christine Perey will animate two. The first on environmental capture tools in the context of augmented reality and the second on the obstacles to the deployment of augmented reality in the industry. We are pleased to have been able to ask Christine a few questions about these two exciting topics!
- On Oct 9th : MAR Experience Capture
- On Oct 13th : Enterprise AR Obstacles
Hello Christine, could we begin by a short introduction about yourself and your consulting company ?
I’m an independent consultant, providing management advisory services and tools about emerging tech topics on which I specialize to companies, government agencies and non-profit groups, and I have a variety of public initiatives about which I feel strongly. I’ve been consulting and serving in these roles for 27 years. For the past 11 years I’ve specialized (and all my activities focus) on Augmented Reality. Within Augmented Reality, my projects have been very diverse. Since 2012 all the projects and initiatives I’ve worked on with clients and other consultants have exclusively concerned enterprise AR.
You will lead two workshops at the next edition of ISMAR (October 2017 in Nantes). Could you explain the subjects to us?
The first is about obstacles to widespread adoption of AR in enterprise environments. There are many pilot and proof of concepts that have been successful but comparatively few have led to deployment of the AR-enabling technology in a systematic fashion. Let me be clear: AR has gone “deeply” and demonstrated very positive results in isolated pockets. There are commercial-scale deployments but they are almost all kept secret.
The purpose of the AR obstacles workshop is to discuss the reasons that we appear to be “stuck” in trials.
The other workshop is on the topic of technologies that are emerging to combine AR with other systems that capture and catalog human and computer activities. The MAR experience capture workshop will permit those working on these tools, services and integration projects to share what they are doing and showcase the state of the art.
Could we focus a little bit on the first workshop about “AR obstacles.” You have been working for over 5 years in the field of industrial Augmented Reality. Is it so complicated today to put AR in a industrial company, even with the numerous use cases?
Well, it’s not difficult to put a small test in place and to gather metrics outside of the “real” workplace. Many large companies have already done tested AR in several use cases and multiple times. Obstacles to reaching true enterprise AR adoption are varied and complex so take a big investment of effort and time to work through. In order to reach its potential impact, AR adoption planning (and execution) needs to involve many different groups within the enterprise: IT, of course, but also the business line managers, Human Resources, legal, workplace safety and security. The different groups must work together to optimize their own priorities and constraints.
The questions that must be answered are both strategic and tactical in nature.
At a strategic level, someone–usually a team with a very senior corporate executive who drives this process– must decide who will be involved in the project planning and management, how much budget is dedicated, what types of risks are acceptable and then which use cases to prioritize.
At a tactical level, when use cases are well documented and understood, we need to identify the best data for AR experiences, and, understanding their limitations, the most appropriate AR tools and displays are selected.
The workshop will identify key obstacles facing AR adoption in 2017 and provide practical, data-driven measures and solutions to addressing obstacles identified by participants and members of the AR for Enterprise Alliance (AREA), the world’s only membership-driven organization focusing on enterprise AR adoption.
There are more and more propositions today for AR services and products for industries, even from companies with obviously few skills in this field. Do you think it is a consequence of the coming maturity of AR, or another example of a “technical and marketing bubble” ?
You are correct that there are a lot of companies proposing enterprise AR services and products. This is a sign that investors (venture capitalists as well as those internal to companies) see signs that there is a strong ROI in this field. Unfortunately, many of those who propose new enterprise AR products and services are only experienced with VR. They can show cool demos with 3D models. In AR there’s a lot more than high definition 3D models! And, where 3D is really valuable, the constraints of AR devices, especially, wearable platforms, require new techniques.
Other companies with new enterprise AR offers are coming from traditional enterprise fields such as Human Resources, Training, Enterprise Process Management, Product Design and, yes, Marketing.
The areas on which I encourage my clients to focus are those that reduce wasted resources and risk for the enterprise. The use of AR to accelerate a process reduces the time it takes.
A last question, in the moving domain of augmented reality, what is, for you, the next surprise we are going to see?
A lot of people are held back in their AR projects by the time and cost of developing excellent AR experience content. They are trying to create entirely new content using technology silos. In the future we are going to be able to re-use assets that are already available and this will cause the content to “erupt.” The use of Web browsers as AR clients will drive this process. Like a volcano, when there are agreements on formats and we move away from custom apps for everything, a huge number of places and things with experiences already associated with them will be accessible. We are going to go from content scarcity, a “famine” of content, to content feast. So, in short, the next big surprises (more than one) will be when we can abandon the custom apps created with Unity and adopt an AR “browsing” of existing data sources.
Thanks Christine !
If you want more information about the two workshop, please contact Christine directly with these links:
- On Oct 9th : MAR Experience Capture
- On Oct 13th : Enterprise AR Obstacles
Grégory MAUBON est consultant indépendant en réalité augmentée (animateur et conférencier) depuis 2008, où il a créé www.augmented-reality.fr et fondé en 2010 RA'pro (l'association francophone de promotion de la réalité augmentée). Il a aidé de nombreuses entreprises (dans plusieurs domaines) à définir précisément leurs besoins en réalité augmentée et les a accompagnées dans la mise en œuvre.