TECHNOLOGY

Real-Life Business Uses for Augmented Reality

Published

1 year ago

October 27, 2022

Real-Life Business Uses for Augmented Reality

The phrase “You have got your head up in the clouds” is no longer an insult in today’s world — having your head in the clouds may be the best way forward in business!

Of course, I’m talking about Augmented Reality (AR); a transformative, disruptive digital technology that has been gaining traction for years and looks to be continuing its exponential growth trend in the years to come. What was originally viewed as only a feature to interactive video games of the future has now made its way into a multitude of industries, and now there are even more opportunities for entrepreneurs and business leaders to leverage AR in advantageous ways.

Bear in mind, it is not always a specific product or service that advances in AR pertain to. Oftentimes, it is industry-level disruption caused by transformative technologies like AR, niche applications of AR that bring new sectors of an industry into the spotlight, or Hard Trend future certainties surrounding AR that businesses and organizations should be examining closely to find a way to leverage before someone else does.

So put on your favorite set of smart glasses and get ready to look closely at some of the most common current trends of AR coming our way in the next year or so! As you explore these topics below, I encourage you to think exponentially about how they can be beneficial to your operation.

Retail and Cosmetics Industry — Try Before You Buy

Even to this day, department stores have areas where men and women can smell perfumes and colognes; try on pants, shirts, swimwear, and other apparel items; and even sample hand creams for consistency and smell. These are all sensory activities that trigger an emotion in a consumer to either purchase the product or to better understand what they don’t want.

AR applications have already started to emerge in this capacity, as witnessed with companies like Warby Parker utilizing the software to allow customers to “try on” frames they select from their app. Additional to eyewear, AR applications also have stemmed into the apparel industry and more recently, the cosmetics industry. An individual interested in lipstick and blush can see how those colors work for them in similar fashion to trying on frames through Warby Parker.

On a human level, this allows businesses and manufacturers to connect with customers on a more personal level, in that they allow them to see what they would look like in apparel or cosmetics without being in public. Believe it or not, this dabbles in my Skip It Principle in unique, exponential ways. Many customers have trouble trying things in front of potential strangers, so AR applications give them a new level of personal privacy in doing so.

Digital Humans and Avatars — The NEW Influencers

If you work in marketing at any size organization of any industry, you are likely familiar with the term “influencer marketing.” If not, let me shed some light on the matter. Influencers are public figures that endorse a brand, just as a professional athlete endorses a pair of sneakers or a musician endorses a specific guitar.

But what about digital influencers, and better yet, digital humans that endorse real products to real people? The Metaverse is a digital universe that AR and Virtual Reality (VR) applications operate in, and within that Metaverse, human beings exist in the form of an avatar. Overseas and around the world, avatars that emulate digital human beings are on the rise in multimedia marketing, interacting with customers on a personal level in the Metaverse as product influencers.

What is further? Consider digital humans selling digital products to real humans in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — a concept I recently explored in a previous blog. If you feel this all to be too “out of this world” for your industry, think again. Marketing researchers estimate that the digital human industry alone will be worth billions in just a few years, opening a veritable vault of opportunity for industries to capitalize on this AR concept.

Don’t Lose Yourself — AR and Our Both/And World

Digital human beings, virtual changing rooms … many are asking with panic, “What has this world come to?!”

Are we losing ourselves in all of this digital technology? Maybe to some degree but staying human in the digital world and finding ways to better the human customer experience with digitally disruptive technology like AR is up to us! Doing so is accomplished first by understanding my Both/And Principle found in my Anticipatory Leader System.

The Both/And Principle focuses on the reality that something new and potentially disruptive may transform the way things are done but will in no way completely erase where we have come from. Especially as it pertains to digital humans and avatars, AR applications will not completely replace the human, tactile experience of trying on clothes or interacting with other human beings.

Trying on cosmetics may be simply done using AR filters and applications, but where AR and VR fall short is in other human sensory areas, including smell, taste, and touch. Until your mobile device screen can emulate how a pillow feels or spritz some cologne on your wrist for sampling, the physical world of consumer experiences is still there and is very valuable.

The two AR concepts explored in today’s blog are meant to enhance the customer user experience, not completely replace the old. Additionally, these concepts have Hard Trend future certainties that all business leaders and C-suite executives can leverage in their specific industry. Thinking in terms of a Both/And world brings clarity to your Futureview and how you can use AR and applications of it to positively disrupt and transform the world.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud