Written by Andy Hird who is the Managing Director for address management specialist Aligned Assets. This blog focuses on augmented reality.
We recently created badges as freebies to highlight risk information associated with a location (using Augmented Reality), I think it’s fair to say that these were quite popular and we didn’t get to take many back from the event.
Recently I just heard back from one of the attendees at the event telling us just how cool the badges were…
“The kids love their badges… they are now super heroes with specific powers…we hide the badges and when they find it, they put it on and gain their super powers!!”
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 | You can change into a dangerous animal of your choice… my sons are tiger and bear! |
 | You can throw balls of fire! |
 | You can throw explosives! |
 | The ULTIMATE Weapon – radiation super power destroying everything around!! |
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Here at Aligned Assets we found the story quite amusing and it got me thinking that in many ways using Augmented Reality within the public sector could give our Emergency Services and council staff superpowers in different ways.
I have just come back from Berlin having attended the AWE 2016 Europe event (October 2016), which aptly was called “Superpowers to the People!”.
This was my first foray into attending an event like this and it was certainly an eye-opener. Some of the work going on within Augmented Reality is really quite exciting and its going to change the way organisations such as Emergency Services and Local government deliver and provide services. The emergence of hardware devices such as Hololens and DAQRI Smart helmet are welcome additions to an already blossoming AR ecosystem, and I don’t think it will be long before we start to see further uptake of smart glasses for commercial use. However in the mean time using Augmented Reality to enhance decision making through traditional mobile and tablet platforms should be a serious consideration for any organisation.
As you may know from our previous blog Aligned Assets adopt augmented reality we have been working on ways in which Augmented reality can be used to help an organisation visualize and display information relevant to geographic locations. One of the business scenarios we have been working on is for our Emergency Services customers, where we are displaying risk marker information against locations which will help help safeguard staff and the public.
This is where the risk information badges we created come in. We wanted to draw attention to the different sorts of risks that may be held against a location, whether that’s a chemical hazard, the presence of a dangerous animal or perhaps the property is a Grade II listed building. Showing this information in an augmented reality view enhances the decision making process and facilitates a deeper understanding of the local environment. Knowing that a property is being used to store bio diesel for instance gives our police officer the equivalent of x ray vision!
Our first release of Symphony AR for the Emergency Services focuses on delivering immediate benefit to the user by the display of marker information relevant to a specific geo-location, but also can see how features such as Image Recognition and image supplementation will enhance the users experience. We cant give too much away on that just now, but stay tuned for further blogs and product information which will elaborate further on these.
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