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This was my first project working with the Microsoft Hololens, and my introduction to augmented reality development in general. I was told about a meeting between Infosys' CEO and the CEO of a large Consumer Packaged Goods company, and was asked if I could create an experience that would serve as a conversation starter. I had about 10 days of lead time and a handful of days tinkering with the Hololens prior.
I reached out to account executives for this company and uncovered pain points in the company's Distribution Resource Planning process. I cross referenced these findings with our AI team to identify overlap and potential solutions. With their help I crafted a story and outline for this experience, which aimed to educate the company's leaders how Infosys' AI platform could help resolve and optimize these distribution issues.
After countless hours spent on Hololens forums and Stack Exchange, I had hacked together a working prototype that was polished enough I felt comfortable sharing as a conversation starter - by no means a final product. There were 6 attendees for this meetings. I had planned to have one lucky volunteer wear the hololens, who I would walk through the experience, and the experience would be streamed to a screen nearby for other 5 people to view. Minutes before giving the demo, the stream cutout and I was not able to fix it. It was gut wrenching, but a test of staying composed. I simply had multiple people wear the headset and presented the experience multiple times, while fielding questions from the team. I later found out the issue was caused by small last minute change I made in the code, which required all of the forward-facing cameras on the Hololens to be used for image recognition and disabled any to be used for video streaming.
The experience was polished for the ATP Finals Tech Showcase and Infosys' hub at the 2017 World Economic Forum. "The Future of Retail" portion of the experience was also added to extend this vision to the consumers’ perspective and illustrate how Infosys will be positioned to support. As mentioned prior, this project was not intended to serve as final solution, but rather a brief experience to start a conversation. It afforded me a chance to learn some pretty interesting development skills in the process.