Augmented Reality as Interface

Application Area: Collaboration & Training
Today the industry is heavily in need for adequate collaboration means. The following example gives an insight in the obstacles the NZ-based furniture company Formway had when transitioning the design of its ‘Life Chair’ to the US: "Formway designers had to videoconference with their counterparts at Knoll everyday for six months, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. However the technology was so inadequate that they still needed to have a Formway employee based in New York for that time, costing many tens of thousands of dollars more. In addition the technology only supported structured collaboration and was not well suited to the informal and spontaneous nature of collaborative design. Formway has tried to address these limitations by expending more than $450,000 to date over three years developing a technology platform that was used during the Life Chair project. (…) Formway plans to spend another $270,000 before April 2003 on the further grows on its technology for collaboration."
This is just one example of many. On the global scale "the market potential for Tele-collaboration exceeds $89.5 Billion. The worldwide market for set-top box and room -conferencing systems alone will grow from approximately $720 million US in 2001 to more than $2.2 billion US in 2006."

AR-Collaboration in the Future

"The internet has brought about a paradigm shift in the way people work. Ubiquitous data communication has supported unprecedented sharing of information and significantly increased personal productivity. Connectivity will be replaced by interoperability; information sharing will be replaced by the co-ordinated sharing of resources. The new data-centric communication paradigm will do for collaborative (group) productivity what the Internet has done for personal productivity."