Some of this is certainly focused around augmented reality, as organizations examine how they might be able to use the cameras on mobile devices to drive image recognition as an additional cue for augmenting their view of the real world. Real time video feeds or snapshots of places and items can be compared against a database of images to identify the place or object and deliver relevant information as an overlay on top of the image feed. Use of location and compass information can limit the search space to a manageable level.

Microsoft Surface is another topic where we’ve been receiving a small but growing number of inquiries. Most of the interest is around how to use the buzz associated with this still-novel interface to drive brand image in hospitality and retail environments, from Barclay’s Bank to the iBar – a 10 foot long bar which reacts to the bottles and glasses and anything else placed on top of it (I’m feeling the need for a field trip to check that one out…)

It’s good to see these ideas emerging from niche research into real commercialization – we’ve been stuck in the WIMP interface paradigm for over three decades now. Our human computer interaction hype cycle (see below) was featured in New Scientist and Fast Company recently – perhaps an indication that the field of HCI is itself rising toward the Peak.

Human Computer Interaction Hype Cycle for 2009

(Note that this human computer interaction hype cycle is NOT the same as the emerging technologies hype cycle – we publish over 70 different hype cycles each year.)

Now available to clients via our
Hype Cycles 2009 special report landing page:

Hype Cycle for Consumer Mobile Applications
Hype Cycle for Consumer Technologies
Hype Cycle for Contact Center Infrastructure
Hype Cycle for Content Management
Hype Cycle for Context-Aware Computing
Hype Cycle for Data Center Power and Cooling Technologies
Hype Cycle for Data Management
Hype Cycle for E-commerce technologies (September)
Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies
Hype Cycle for Enterprise Communications Applications
Hype Cycle for Enterprise Information Management
Hype Cycle for Global Consumer Communications Services
Hype Cycle for Human-Computer Interaction
Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies
Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection
Hype Cycle for Master Data Management
Hype Cycle for Mobile Device Technologies
Hype Cycle for Networking and Communications
Hype Cycle for PC Technologies
Hype Cycle for Photovoltaic Solar Energy
Hype Cycle for Printing Markets and Management
Hype Cycle for Semiconductors
Hype Cycle for Server Technologies
Hype Cycle for Smart Grid Technologies
Hype Cycle for Social Software
Hype Cycle for Storage Hardware Technologies
Hype Cycle for Storage Software Technologies
Hype Cycle for Telemedicine
Hype Cycle for the High-Performance Workplace
Hype Cycle for Web and User Interaction Technologies
Hype Cycle for Wireless Devices, Software and Services
Hype Cycle for Application Architecture
Hype Cycle for Application Development
Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure
Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure
Hype Cycle for Business Continuity Management
Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence and Performance Management
Hype Cycle for Business Process Management
Hype Cycle for Business Process Outsourcing
Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing
Hype Cycle for Consulting and System Integration, 2009
Hype Cycle for CRM Customer Service and Field Service
Hype Cycle for CRM Marketing Applications
Hype Cycle for CRM Sales
Hype Cycle for Data and Application Security
Hype Cycle for Governance, Risk and Compliance Technologies
Hype Cycle for Human Capital Management Software
Hype Cycle for ICT in India
Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management
Hype Cycle for IT Outsourcing
Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Product Lifecycle Management and Production
Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software
Hype Cycle for Procurement Applications
Hype Cycle for Real-Time Infrastructure
Hype Cycle for Software as a Service
Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Management
Hype Cycle for Virtualization
Hype Cycle for Automotive Demand Chain and Supply Chain Technologies
Hype Cycle for Banking and Investment Services Customer Technologies
Hype Cycle for Banking and Investment Services Operations Technologies
Hype Cycle for Communications Service Provider Infrastructure
Hype Cycle for Communications Service Provider Operations
Hype Cycle for Consumer Goods
Hype Cycle for Education
Hype Cycle for Financial Services Payment Systems
Hype Cycle for Government Transformation
Hype Cycle for Healthcare Payers
Hype Cycle for Healthcare Provider Applications and Systems
Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers Technologies and Standards
Hype Cycle for Life Insurance
Hype Cycle for Media Broadcasting
Hype Cycle for Media Industry Advertising
Hype Cycle for Media Industry Content
Hype Cycle for P&C Insurance
Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies
Hype Cycle for the Telecommunications Industry
Hype Cycle for Transportation
Hype Cycle for Utility Industry IT and Business Processes
Hype Cycle for Utility Industry Operational and Energy Technologies
Hype Cycle for Vehicle-Centric Information and Communication Technologies (Vehicle ICT)

We’re also seeing a growing body of well-informed discussion and debate around types of augmented reality and their relative maturity. In Augmented Vision and the Decade of Ubiquity, Robert Rice separates out four levels of AR, distinguishing the current batch of animation-enhanced video feedbacksystems (eg from Total Immersion) from those like Mobilitzy’s Wikitude that stay closer to the original vision of using knowledge of the user’s location and other context to superimpose relevant information. In the Augmented Reality Hype Cycle, Maarten of SPRXMobile positions the four styles and other additions on a hype cycle chart, triggering some interesting debate about capabilities such as dumb vs smart augmentation (ie does the system deliver a static piece of information linked to an object or place, or does it use context to deliver dynamic links).

This level of discourse, along with the beginnings of the commercial services, indicates that the topic is climbing higher toward the Peak of Inflated Expectations. We’ll shortly be updating the hype cycle entry for augmented reality for this summer’s Hype Cycle Special Report and we’ll move it along accordingly.

Hans Uszkoreit gives a history of the machine translation hype cycle , concluding (hoping?) that the technology is finally on the slope of enlightenment. He also points out insightfully that this field is one where the fractal nature of the hype cycle may come into play: “Perhaps in fact the Hype Cycle is fractal, each slope containing smaller mini peaks and troughs within the overall pattern. It may prove hard to distinguish clearly between those old “inflated expectations” and the current widespread “hype” that there will be genuine productivity when Enlightenment is attained and new projects come to fruition within the (proverbial) next five years. Or to put it more bluntly, will MT ever grow into a visible business over and beyond its role as a technology add-on?”

Ryan Saghir also gives a brief history of satellite radio’s journey through the hype cycle, and triggers some lively debate about whether Sirius XM is in the trough of disillusionment.

Are there new domains you would like to see us add to this list? We would be interested to hear.

Remember hype cycles cover technologies rather than vendors and the domains are often thematic e.g. ‘government transformation’, not just markets.

Also to Martin Veitch at Network World for an excellent review of the book with the rather humbling last paragraph:

JG at spatiallyrelevant.org has created an interesting Twitter hype cycle tracking a person’s reactions as he or she develops familiarity with the tool, showing the path from “What is Twitter?”, through “I might be able to make money at this” and on to the Trough of Disillusionment with “Nope, not going to make money”.  The Slope of Enlightenment is characterized by ”I might develop some real cool relationships” and eventually onto ”I’m not sure how I communicated via email”, with some other fun points in between. (Thanks to PatMcGrew’s tweet for pointing this one out

Which leads to the question – when a single company or Web site becomes synonymous with a new capability, is the company itself more likely to be subject to the hype cycle effect? Certainly the earlier inflated levels of hype and expectations around Second Life have contributed to a Trough of Disillusionment for virtual worlds in general. Press coverage morphed from cover stories on Virtual World, Real Money  to laments about Second Life’s Real World Problems. Google Trends shows a clear waning of interest in searches for “Second Life” since its peak in the first half of 2007. Google has announced it is shutting down its own virtual world, Lively.

Our expectation is that Second Life’s high profile means that it will continue to track - in fact define – the overall virtual worlds hype cycle for the next couple of years. Beyond that timeframe, it is open season. The precedents are mixed. Although the Palm Pilot was the device that launched PDAs out of a premature Trough (triggered by the poor quality of the Apple Newton’s handwriting recognition), and although Palm is still hanging in with the Treo, it definitely no longer dominates the category. On the other hand, AOL’s AIM has maintained its leadership position in the US for many years even as others have entered the market.

The uncertain benefits of virtual worlds for a business audience mean that a prolonged Trough is likely as companies explore the real value proposition.  Second Life itself will emerge from the Trough, based on its hard-won experience of what does and doesn’t work in virtual worlds. According to my colleague Steve Prentice, who has been watching the vendors closely:

“The challenge for Linden is to refocus their energies on meeting the needs of an enterprise audience without completely alienating their existing long standing residents.  This will not be an easy path to tread, but the signs are that the new CEO Mark Kingdon understands the requirements and is working hard to reposition Second Life as a platform rather than a destination. The recent collaboration with Rivers Run Red who is offering its Immersive Workspace is a strong move in the right direction, but they need a broader range of enterprise focused applications to convince skeptical business leaders that the old days are behind them and flying body parts are a thing of the past in Second Life.”

However, Second Life hasn’t achieved enough market penetration across a broad enough demographic (including enterprises) to be assured of remaining the defining force that will drive virtual worlds up the Slope of Enlightenment. It may be able to redesign and reinvent itself, but others will also be able to learn from Second Life’s lessons. Our advice to technology adopters in Mastering the Hype Cycle, where we featured Second Life as an example of evaluating capabilities independently of specific products, still holds:

“So, while Second Life may or may not maintain its dominance among virtual worlds, companies that became residents of Second Life to test various uses and benefits have actually been learning not just about this one product but about the broader lessons associated with the virtual worlds.”

What’s interesting of course is to look at the pattern of each previous “technological revolution” to see if it sheds any light on the future of our current one (information and technology). Perez points out that the pattern certainly looks familiar so far: an eruption phase with a rapid growth of core technologies, followed by a frenzy phase consisting of an explosive expansion of infrastructure and financial speculation. In every other technological revolution, the frenetic build out of the infrastructure and the financial bubble that accompanied it was followed by financial collapse – again, sounds familiar. The good news is that, if the model holds true, the next phases (synergy and maturity) are where we’ll start to see the real impact of the technologies on business and society. Just as the car led to social constructs such as suburbs and shopping malls, information technology will continue to transform the way we live and work.

And yes, the hype cycle overlays perfectly onto Perez’s charts of bubbles and crashes and eventual maturity. It seems that we reserve our greatest enthusiasm and financial speculation for anything to do with infrastructure – canals, railways, highways or the Internet. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Kondratiev waves span a generation – we need a new set of suckers… I mean speculators, who haven’t seen it all before and are willing to fuel the (seemingly essential) massive, global experimentation of each technological revolution.

But there is a reason it’s worth having a collective term such as ‘the cloud’ (our definition for which,  my colleague David Smith has blogged) and some buzz around it.  We have to simplify the business proposition behind this ‘big shift’,  explain it well and socialize it deeply to convince non-tech business leaders to buy-in. That’s because CIOs don’t have sole authority over the decision to move in this direction. There are other CXO collaborators and co-signatories.  So far, I think this is the best we have come up with.  Surely we don’t believe that offering to explain Grid, ASP, SaaS, Ajax and the rest of the growing acronym soup is really a better option.

Think back to the start of this decade, to a time when business IT was really booming and world-wide IT budget increases averaged over 15% rather than the 3 to 4 % we see today. I’ll suggest it was big ideas packaged in simple terms – like CRM and E-Business that helped CEOs digest what the the IT department was trying to tell them. Yes these have indeed been very, very big umbrella terms and some junk creeps in at the edges – but IT departments usually know how to filter that out.

What IT departments are are not so good at is articulating the big, collective and increasingly integrated move towards remotely hosted web-borne services from office tools to biz apps and telecoms to storage. They need help explaining the fundamental change towards an ‘I don’t care’ mindset about exactly where and how things are hosted and operated, which trades-off perceived risk for the scale economies of workload aggregation.  Having a friendly term to collect and embrace this big-deal evolutionary step in commercial IT helps.

It’s too simplistic to say cloud hype is bad . If we are technically expert is might irritate us with its breadth and abstraction, but we are not the only audience.  Somehow the idea has to  cross the corridor into other business departments and that’s just as likely to be via a Business Week article or even (dare I say it?) an airline in-flight magazine.  Whether we like it or not, repeatedly promoting a basic collective term through broader media has a long history of overcoming corporate resistance and inertia in ways IT departments can’t do alone. ‘The cloud’ is a BIG idea, its a reasonable visual metaphor and most of all its not an acronym.  It may not be perfect, but if it captures the imaginations of a broader audience of decision makers we should cut it some slack.  IT must remember that even its biggest ideas compete for mind-share with other major strategic change and improvement options – like moving to the Chinese market, restructuring the finances, building a new headquarters, or re-branding.

Of course all new technology terms must be throroughly tire-kicked by market discourse and the hype cycle makes the coming trough of disillusionment for cloud as inevitable as it is necessary.  But sustaining belief in this particular term just a while longer before we all trash it,  might be the path of elightened self interest.