Once again, no-one invited me to Davos this year, so I’ve been spending my time noodling about XBRL analytics and in particular the visualization of XBRL data. Which led me to this odd couple: XBRL and Augmented Reality. By the way, I think Walter Matthau is perfect for the part of XBRL.

Perhaps you have been too busy living your life to have noticed that Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the next big things. Currently it’s technology associated with mobile phones or the future generation of geekware –  intelligent spectacles. Basically you point your phone camera or iSpecs at a real world object and through the magic of a local wireless Internet connection you see lots of information overlaid on the object that tells you more about it. So basically we have an object, say a tourist site in a big city, and a bunch of information that floats around it telling us more or inviting us to click on links to find out more.

Now imagine you see a brand logo out on your travels and you want a quick snapshot of financial information about that business. AR technology is capable of recognizing that logo (via back-end image matching) and so one of the ‘contexts’ or ‘layers’ you could chose to augment the reality of that logo is ‘financial’. And how that layer works is that it accesses publicly available XBRL filings to interrogate the data to present it back to you.

Now why anyone would want to do that is not clear to me yet. But if you wanted to you could. XBRL and augmented reality. You heard it here first.

Tags: Analytics

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 5:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.