Digital Disruption from EX²

The enterprise content management industry saw many significant changes during 2016. Acquisitions, mergers and rebranding abounded. For example, OpenText announced plans to acquire Documentum and the rest of Dell's enterprise content division, while Apex Technology acquired Lexmark and rebranded the enterprise software group as Kofax. The year even saw a change in the very definition of enterprise content management; Gartner's Magic Quadrant emphasized the need for a highly personalized, more flexible approach that is context-based rather than simply a means to manage unstructured content.

The basic concept of augmented reality, or AR, has been around since the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1901, author L. Frank Baum, creator of the Oz books, discussed spectacles and electronic devices that could overlay information on top of real-world images. Hollywood began experimenting with AR during the 1950s, but it was not until the 1970s that significant progress began to be made on AR wearable tech. The "next big thing" in AR was its use for television weather maps, followed quickly by its implementation in video gaming. 

Today, developers are creating a vast array of devices and applications specifically designed to merge the physical world with the digital. However, AR should not be confused with virtual reality. Virtual reality completely replaces the "real world" with a totally virtual world; augmented reality blends the two worlds into a single experience. Savvy marketers have already begun to leverage AR in a variety of ways, and many more creative uses are sure to follow.

Augmented reality, or AR, is still perceived by some as a future technology, straight out of science-fiction movies. In truth, AR has been in use for several years, and it is a rapidly growing technology for marketing. As the name implies, AR takes a picture of a real scene, allows the user to add or change elements and then displays the integrated (or augmented) image.