AR data visualisation

Background

Business intelligence reports are read on flat screens, which limits how many dimensions can be shown at once. Augmented reality had been applied to business contexts before, but not in combination with an enterprise reporting system, and no study had established whether companies would actually adopt it. That left two open questions: whether browser-based AR is technically viable against a live SAP source, and what stops organisations from using it.

Approach

• ✓Reviewed existing AR applications in business contexts and identified the gap: no AR-based data visualisation integrated with SAP BusinessObjects.
• ✓Surveyed 81 participants across German companies on adoption barriers and which visualisation features would be useful.
• ✓Designed a system architecture joining web technologies, AR frameworks and an enterprise data source.
• ✓Built the frontend with Angular 14 and TypeScript, using AR.js, A-Frame and BabiaXR for the immersive layer.
• ✓Implemented marker generation and recognition with ARToolKit for precise spatial positioning of the 3D charts.
• ✓Built a Spring Boot backend with REST APIs pulling live data from SAP BusinessObjects, validated against the INFOMOTION library database and its lending analytics.
• ✓Tested functional and non-functional requirements, including rendering performance and load time.

Results

• ✓Bar charts, pie charts and multi-chart displays rendered in AR with full rotation and scaling
• ✓Rendering held above 50 frames per second, with all components loading in under 15 seconds
• ✓Ran in Chrome and Firefox without an app install, on the device people already carry
• ✓The survey named the two main barriers: lack of knowledge (59 percent) and missing use cases (41 percent)
• ✓Demonstrated that browser-based AR is feasible for enterprise reporting, and produced a framework for later AR business intelligence work

Technology stack

• Angular 14
• TypeScript
• AR.js
• A-Frame
• BabiaXR
• ARToolKit
• Spring Boot
• REST APIs
• SAP BusinessObjects