Dimensional Customer Experiences: Emerging Methods for AR/VR Content Workflows

Augmented Reality(AR) will more than likely touch each of our professional lives, and influence the content we develop, in the foreseeable future. Investing a bit of time to evaluate how AR may impact our customer-experiences is likely worth some near-term thinking.

If we determine AR will matter, then we should start thinking through how content flows into these new three-dimensional experiences. When we develop plans to intelligently address this upcoming content output from the beginning, we will help head off creating content silos in the process.

AR will likely play a significant role in future customer experiences involving our products, educating our customers, and supporting our internal teams. AR will change software interfaces, gaming interfaces, and marketing and sales customer journeys.

Internally, it may play a role in our quality assurance efforts, field support, product and experience testing, and automated troubleshooting. By implementing AR with an eye to content flow, we can ensure that 3D interactive spaces will figure into an intelligent, modular content ecosystem.

Investigating the Landscape of Augmented Reality for Technical Communication

Augmented reality (AR) is not all black goggles, gaming, and consumer applications. This emerging technology applies to more than you might think across the customer experience landscape.

In the customer experience and communication professions, our goal is to deliver the right content interactions as seamlessly as possible. Because augmented reality superimposes content over real-world environments, we are getting even closer to meeting users where they are in realtime. We create a bridge between our customer’s world and our own.

A 2017 issue of Time Magazine predicted that “in 10–15 years augmented reality and virtual reality are going to become the primary use for computer interactions.” Ambitious sounding, but new modes of interaction gain adoption every single day. The rate at which both conversational interfaces and wearables have become part of our everyday lives has been astounding. With lower costs and improved technology, augmented reality is certainly on the same path.

With that said, organizations in the content space need to set strategy for how to address this new delivery channel, with new content types, elements, and interactions.

We should proceed towards the future of customer experience in an intelligent way, without constructing yet more content silos along the way. This mindset applies to any adaptive content experience including chatbots, personalized interactions, marketing automation, and new dimensional spaces.

To get insight into the current and future state of AR, we spoke with content professionals within organizations that are already leveraging this technology. We discussed how they are using AR, where they are in the process, what they’ve discovered, and how to best include AR in an intelligent content framework.

Moving Content into Three-Dimensional Spaces

AR is here, and it’s already transforming the technical content landscape. Farhad Patel and the technical documentation team at Huawei have made considerable progress in developing practical documentation solutions using AR. Huawei, based in China, has been in news due to trade disputes, but they remain an innovative enterprise pushing the envelope of content interactions.

Many of the products from Huawei’s Enterprise and Carrier product lines involve servers, routers, cabinets, CPUs, and other devices that require documentation for installation or replacement tasks. With certain products, support staff needed to perform many installations or repairs per day. Also, training and ramp-up time for field staff needed to be reduced. Shorter training time and greatly reduced documentation volume were called for, even with increased product complexity.

The Huawei team saw augmented reality as a game-changer for achieving these goals. The documentation team explored how to make some critical installation or repair procedures seamless and foolproof in the field.

In a YouTube video titled “Huawei SUN2000–25KTL — AR in Information Products,” Huawei demonstrates how AR is enhancing their installation and maintenance operations. In this scenario, a field technician holds his tablet up to his work area. Technical instructions appear, step by step, at the bottom of the screen. In addition, support graphics are overlaid onto the tablet to help the user identify the correct object, demonstrate the action needed to complete the step, and offer on-demand support features.

As the video suggests, “real-time, contextual access to information leads to higher efficiency.”

How Do AR Solutions Work?

There are many different approaches to AR.

Typically, the user sees live images of an object (product) through a mobile device (often a smartphone or tablet). The AR software on the device identifies and interprets live images by searching and comparing them with images stored in a local or remote database. Once matches are found, the AR device will simultaneously display or superimpose the digital content associated with a particular image.

This process continues seamlessly as the user changes orientation or moves around and as new images (people, places, or objects) come within range of the sensors (in this case, a camera). Superimposed content seamlessly changes on an as-needed basis to match what the user is seeing.

A simplified definition of the technology and hardware components behind a typical AR solution includes these items:

• QR codes
• 2D image tracking
• 3D edge-based tracking
• Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)

A simplified sequence of events that takes place 25 times
per second with AR. Referencing Huawei’s “Amplifying Content with
Augmented Reality” process.

Lessons Learned: Some Surprises for Early Adopters

Early adopters are learning the hard lessons for us as they explore new content territory. Those working with augmented reality report some unique — and not-so-unique — challenges they face when embarking on these projects. Here are some points of advice and best practices to keep in mind.

• Identify what documentation can be converted into an AR experience with relative ease.
• Carefully select products that are capable of image tracking, and consider surface shine or lighting that current cameras can’t deal with.
• Schedule for a longer-than-normal planning phase.
• Prepare content creators to deal with screen layout and display location of imposed images to keep a tracked object in view.
• Begin with a storyboard to illustrate each progressive view to develop a list of concepts or steps to provide.
• Be prepared to make more iterations than in traditional documentation and to master new testing routines that involve space, time, motion, and image tracking.
• “Thin down” digital assets to account for large file sizes and the pressure on power and computing resources. 3D models must also be thinned down to remove any proprietary information.

The strategists that we talked to emphasized how important it is avoid being distracted by the tools themselves or by a “sexy demo” pilot project. Instead, focus on measurable business objectives, and choose your documented product and project wisely — preferably with steps that have been tested beforehand to reduce project development time.

Promising Results Encourage More Exploration

With significant challenges come significant benefits. Some customer case studies have documented 35 percent efficiency gains for new staff performing complex installations when using AR instead of traditional documentation.

Early adopters are seeing other benefits:

• Classroom training has been drastically reduced — and in some cases, eliminated.
• The amount of text involved is substantially reduced, because information is delivered in context.
• Tasks can be significantly simplified, making it possible for less-skilled labor to perform some installations.
• Remote support is facilitated, because off-site staff can view what the user is viewing on their device, and annotations can be made on-screen by remote staff.
• The end user rarely needs to use search, as AR will push relevant visual content to the user based on context.
• AR can be used in QA due to superior camera tracking technology (vs. the human eye). Some customers are able to use AR cameras for testing procedures.

How Can We Prepare for AR?

Organizations use AR to deliver an in-context experience, rather than multi-channel documentation. As such, special consideration is needed to prepare content for intelligent delivery.

The screen real estate in many AR environments is dramatically smaller, so the text must be limited and positioned so that it does not obscure live, real-time images. Therefore, content needs to be divided into even smaller chunks to accommodate many AR displays.

In addition, content engineers need to prepare to carefully update a governing schema, or Master Content Model®, to accommodate the following new dimensions:

• Time
• Motion
• Space
• Image tracking
• Variable user viewpoints

With those elements in place, a short description tag in DITA specific to AR may be assigned, if DITA is in use in the environment.

During content creation, the content creator can associate dimensional content references, or inclusions, along the topic-based textual chunks being authored and stored in any form of content repository.

Associating the AR assets with a common tagging structure, allows them to be associated appropriately to other assets and situated within a customer experience context.

If stored content has references to AR assets, and integrated semantic associations, it becomes possible for a publishing system to push that content directly into an AR environment. That way, the textual content and vector-based AR assets may be managed separately from new compiled AR applications.

Authoring, of course, changes to accommodate dimensional customer experiences. This might not only require new skills for content creators to master, but also a somewhat different mindset about how to view content while authoring.

“We are no longer just authoring content for publication. With AR we are authoring an instructive experience for the customer.” — Farhad Patel

What’s on the Horizon?

Technology growth in sectors like artificial intelligence and machine learning are already helping to reduce the cognitive load that prevents humans from being more creative and productive workers.

Serving content in context through AR would be a tremendous step forward past the page-centric ecosystem that many technical communication practitioners (and customers) are struggling with.

Augmented reality is becoming an everyday reality sooner than we think. We must learn from the pioneers and adventure-seekers that thrive in our industry and begin now to educate ourselves about the opportunities and challenges that await us in this new arena.

Organizations considering next-generation customer experiences, including augmented and virtual reality content distribution, should consider collaborating with [A] to develop a Master Content Model® and a new content operating model that supports future forms of content. To read more about the Master Content Model®, download the whitepaper.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pontus Blomberg of 3D Studio Blomberg and Farhad Patel of Huawei and for their time and insight.

References

Bajarin, Tim. (2017) “This Technology Could Replace the Keyboard and Mouse.” Time Magazine. http://time.com/4654944/this-technology-could-replace-the-keyboard-and-mouse/.

“Huawei SUN2000–25KTL — AR in Information Products.” YouTube video, 2:18, posted by “inglobe,” 10 October 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA6gHm5uvus.

Patel, Farhad. (2018) Personal interview at Huawei, Inc., Dallas, TX.

[A] — simplea.com. (2018) Mastering the Master Content Model®. https://simplea.com/Publications/Whitepapers/master-content-model.

Article modified an original version published in Intercom by the Society for Technical Communication.

[A] is the Content Intelligence Service. In partnership with leading global enterprises, [A] orchestrates content intelligence systems that unify the people, processes, and technology for omnichannel publishing and real-time personalized customer experiences at scale. The patterns in the [A] Content Intelligence Framework support strong returns on content asset investments, streamlined and integrated content operations, and a lean content supply chain.