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2020 Augmented Reality

Viewing Small Parts of Big Data

2013 is only 32 hours "old." Can I view how my place on the planet has evolved in those hours? No.

I can't see how many people went skiing on the mountain at which I'm looking or what the temperature was (or is) as I walk along the edge of Lake Geneva. But the information is "there." The data to answer these questions are somewhere, already part of Big Data. Dawn of 2013 on Lake Geneva

It could be displayed on my laptop screen but I'm convinced it would be more valuable to see the same data on and in the world. It's getting easier with cloud-based tools to make small, select data sets available in AR view, but we are far from being surrounded in this data.

One of the issues stems from needing a human, a developer, to associate an action with every published data set. Click on the digital button to go to the coupon. Click on the flag to see the height of the mountain.

What if some data were just data? Could we, without associating an action to them, have data automatically made visible?

The high cost and effort still required to make "just data" about a user's context and surroundings accessible on the fly are major impediments to our being able to use the digital universe more fully. Overcoming these obstacles will require open interfaces, many of which could be defined by standards, upon which new services will be offered.

But there also must be deeper thought and research into how we are presented with data, what it looks like, and the dimensions of the data provided to us. What is the appropriate resolution? How do I adjust this?

These questions are not trivial. I'm disappointed that the new IDC study on Big Data in 2020 doesn't go into how we will visualize Big Data in the future. I hope a future study will examine how small a data set is still valuable to different tasks, different modes of a professional or consumer user. This research could help us better understand the Big Data opportunities as well as helping us better quantify the value of Augmented Reality.

Let's hope that we will see this topic raised by others (with the data to define it better) before the end of this young year!