
5. AR augmented by Artificial Intelligence
Connecting AR ro AI (and the other way round) is a no brainer. AI (and Machine Learning) are becoming basic tools in exploring the huge data sets that are available and connecting them. The emerging information can be made visible, and graspable, by using Augmented Reality.
Think of walking an aisle in a department store. Your customer profile is constantly enriched by the observation of what youhave placed in your cart, by the time you spent in front of a product on a shelf, even by what you are wearing at that particular moment. Depending on how much you are willing to share with the department store information from your agenda may show that you are having dinner with friends at home tonight. The enhanced profile can be used to point you to a sauce on the shelf and your interest can be raised by presenting you, through augmented reality, the way a spaghetti meal with that sauce can look like on your table, covered with a tablecloth that you can get just two shelves away.
The potential to increase buying appeal through Augmented Reality is clear and coupling it with Artificial Intelligence can be boosting it to higher levels. Notice that this is also becoming attractive in ecommerce.
Artificial Intelligence is getting more and more a building component for image recognition and in turns image recognition is becoming more and more important on the manufacturing plant to identify objects, tools, semi-manufactured products and the overall context. This is processed into a situational knowledge that is turn is used to help workers. This help, as indicated in previous posts, is delivered using augmented reality, contextualising the “bits” to the atoms they connect.
Microsoft has recently shared their vision of a workplace where AI-AR support more efficient cooperative working (watch the clip).
For more use cases in AI-AR take a look at this article.