SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it’s a prototype, not a supported product. It’s not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like.
Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.
The app prototype enables users to mashup location information with any sort of corporate data available in an enterprise’s BusinessObjects OnDemand account. The use case Elliot demonstrates is locating the nearest customers and displaying supplemental information.
Mashing up location data with CRM data has obvious, if limited, benefit – but what other sorts of uses are possible?
The current limitation of the app is the precision of location based services. Elliot’s previous mock-ups presented some extremely interesting use cases that would require considerably greater precision:
Imagine pointing a smart phone at a piece of equipment or merchandise and pulling up information about it from an ERP system, and being able to update that information from the same interface.
What could really be useful for enterprises is the intersection of augmented reality with the Internet of Things. Google Goggles can already recognize objects (and people), but what sort of use cases would open up if an AR app could identify individual objects and communicate with the objects themselves?
