Bloomberg Explores AR in the Office with NYU Media Lab & Lampix

Group of professionals collaborating around a touchscreen display during a workshop.

While augmented reality is a means for presenting news to their audiences to some media outlets, Bloomberg is interested in how the technology can improve the way journalists work.

The Bloomberg AR Fellows, a program hosted by the NYU Media Lab in partnership with Bloomberg and Lampix, have developed five prototypes that give a glimpse of how augmented reality can help office workers analyze data and manage their work.

The teams built their concepts for the Lampix augmented reality projector. Comprised of a Raspberry Pi 3 with two cameras, a high-resolution projector, and an LED system, Lampix connects to a PC or smartphone to turn any surface into an augmented reality computing interface.

DataTouch visualizes data pulled from a printed document.

Five teams of NYU graduate students spent six weeks creating concepts with the goal of applying augmented reality to improve the workplace. Attacking areas such as document processing, data analysis, digital document interaction, collaboration, and workflows, the teams recently presented their concepts to employees from various departments at Bloomberg.

One prototype, called DataTouch, uses Lampix to extract data from a hardcopy of a document and project a visualization of the data. Another concept, dubbed Delve, enables users to project documents onto a surface and use dry-erase markers to highlight selections, which can be organized as notes and cross-reference via web searches.

Perhaps using physical objects makes pivot tables less maddening?

Other teams demonstrated how to manipulate data in pivot tables or graphs by moving physical markers or blocks around a Lampix-augmented surface.

"We live in a world where a lot of the physical objects are lifeless. What AR promises to do is to really give an enduring life to all these products after they're built and after they're created. I think within the next two to four years we're going to see some kind of AR in enterprise," said Gideon Mann, head of data science at Bloomberg's Office of the CTO, via YouTube.

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Cover image via Bloomberg

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