How Augmented Reality Works

Video games have been entertaining us for nearly 30 years, ever since Pong was introduced to arcades in the early 1970s. Computer graphics have become much more sophisticated since then, and game graphics are pushing the barriers of photorealism. Now, researchers and engineers are pulling graphics out of your television screen or computer display and integrating them into real-world environments. This new technology, called augmented reality, blurs the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell.
On the spectrum between virtual reality, which creates immersive, computer-generated environments, and the real world, augmented reality is closer to the real world. Augmented reality adds graphics, sounds, haptic feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists. Both video games and cell phones are driving the development of augmented reality. Everyone from tourists, to soldiers, to someone looking for the closest subway stop can now benefit from the ability to place computer-generated graphics in their field of vision.
Augmented reality is changing the way we view the world -- or at least the way its users see the world. Picture yourself walking or driving down the street. With augmented-reality displays, which will eventually look much like a normal pair of glasses, informative graphics will appear in your field of view, and audio will coincide with whatever you see. These enhancements will be refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head. Similar devices and applications already exist, particularly on smartphones like the iPhone.

UX Design

UX design means taking your users needs into account at every stage of your product lifecycle. From usability of your website home page to adding a product to your cart to receiving the email invoice. UX is the difference between a good & bad website.

UX (User experience) encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with your company, its services, and its products.

A great user experience meets the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother, simply giving customers what they say they want. UX is the: what, when, where, why, how, and who of a product. Pretty much everything that affects a user’s interaction with that product.

 

3 trends will drive enterprise software development in 2014

HTML5 growth

It’s been around in the consumer space for quite some time, but businesses have started to truly understand the advantages (and limitations) of HTML5 in the enterprise. Now that every CIO/CMO/CXO has been clued into the value of native mobile applications for their respective workforces, we’re seeing a progression once again toward the ‘write once, play everywhere’ concept, ironically enough.

What Java promised in the mid-1990s, HTML5 may actually be able to deliver to businesses making new IT investments. Browser acceptance of new standards such as offline file storage, drag and drop, advanced drawing tools, and multi-media playback without plugin support augment what it means to be a website. As these standards have become fleshed out and implemented across browsers, we’ve seen everything from cutting-edge line-of-business web applications to firewalled corporate intranets being deployed with large HTML5 support.

Business gamification

Gamification is a hot topic for multiple reasons. Marketers love it because it can create stickier customers. Consumers love it because there are very real rewards that can be gained by getting on leaderboards. But now, corporate managers are getting into the concept because it’s beginning to look like a Trojan horse into decreasing the universal hate for performance evaluations.

By gamifying employee efficiency and quantifying minute tasks in a business environment, enterprises are gaining all sorts of new data points around worker productivity. We’ve seen companies like Spotify implement it in their workplace as primary mechanisms for employees to complete tasks.

Building integrated systems and software applications that support gamification actually creates a unique opportunity for enterprises taking the plunge. It has the potential to re-energize mass workforces that despise typical employee evaluation techniques. It also has the unique tech characteristic of being industry agnostic. Creating metrics to judge employee efficiency and overall contribution to company growth is a hallmark of big business — and applications that plug into large ERPs or business operations systems are ripe for gamification to overthrow normal evaluation methods.

Picture-perfect launches

Every once in a while, tech events escape from the tech world and transcend into the business world. In 2007, any normal guy on the street knew about the iPhone. In 2011, Facebook’s IPO was subject to constant speculation from non-technorati as much as tech elite. In 2013, it was the very public failure of the federal government’s go-live of Healthcare.gov.

The government’s ambitious ACA digital emblem suffered from very severe issues from system lags to downright application failure for millions of Americans. As far as technology launches go, it was one of the most public flops to ever occur.

Though it happened outside the private sector, the very public nature of its execution left a lasting shock on the business community. Working both inside and outside the health care space, we’ve heard the worries and apprehensions from CIOs across industries about the go-lives of their new projects.

Obviously, with the issues that plagued the enormous application, from a lack of system wide project management to admissions of inadequate software quality assurance, businesses will undoubtedly be more focused on what has traditionally been viewed as more of the ‘bookkeeping’ aspect of IT development. In 2014, expect senior leadership from companies to not take public launches for granted and really start to emphasize superior project management and software quality control