At CES, I witnessed some interesting uses of visual augmented reality. Objects in a camera viewer were animated and overlayed onto the view of a tablet or smartphone. This type of AR could provide new ways for manufacturing and field services organizations to create and fix products.
But it also highlights how digitization of the enterprise also increases the threats. There is a lot of effort now in digitizing enterprise content to remove updating paper manuals. This digitization effort will eventually use more augmented reality technologies and applications. Once digitized, nefarious sorts could alter the digital information - such as install the wrongpart in an aircraft engine instead of another - you can imagine the consequences.
The question becomes how sophisticated are those inindustrial espionage to hack and alter visual information - images or even videos. My guess is that this would be hard and a hacker would rather simply alter text. Regardless, greater digitization offers more opportunities for security attacks. And it also highlights that some forms of digitization may be preferred over others to guard content and its potential alteration. Bottomline, AR provides new opportunities but will also introduce new challenges.
