Augmented Reality DevCamp Zurich: Summary Points

Augmented Reality DevCamp in Zurich covered a lot of ground.

The technology that supports this “reality improved” context is being used across several industries and is poised for even greater adoption.  

The power of the technology lies in where it can make a difference in everyday life or business.  To demonstrate this, participants were lead through multiple exercises by the presenters.

For example, Swisscom provided an excellent framework for discussing applications for different personas and the group created multiple user opportunities spanning health care workers to shoppers to business travelers.

The user needs and AR solutions could also be summarized by broader opportunity themes, including my examples below. 

Additional rich discussion included different business models across public content, premium content, or crowd-sourced content and the future vision of the “Augmented Citizen” with all the privacy concerns that need to be addressed.

And a couple interesting customer insights from Metaio, a German company that has been in the AR business for six years, include that Italians are the most pervasive creators of user generated AR and that when given free range to create personal AR pictures, people chose to create scenes that show rather normal aspects of daily life made more amusing by AR graphics (i.e. a picture of a man’s wife sitting at the breakfast table in a robe with an AR dragon flying around her) not well scripted pictures where everyone has on their Sunday best.

At the end of the event everyone was given the opportunity to go outside in downtown Zurich and experiment with several applications. One of my favorites was SwissPeaks, where you point the phone at the distant alpine range and it names and gives data on the mountains.  Time to go skiing…

Many thanks to IBM and Christine Perey for organizing and sponsoring this event! (More pictures…  http://tinyurl.com/yh2x8da)