Back in 2009, I announced that SAS was developing a version of its business analytics platform for use on the Nintendo Wii. I think I gave our legal department a heart attack with this news, until they realized that I had posted it on April 1.
At SAS Global Forum 2012, the "joke" came to life, and it's now a more serious endeavor. Video game technologies (and other consumer electronic products) are changing the way that people expect to interact with their digital content -- not just for entertainment, but also for business. At the conference during the SAS Tech Talk webcast, I interviewed SAS BI developer Mike Barnhart. Mike demonstrated the experimental work that he's doing with Microsoft Kinect, as well as with the large-format touchscreen table called Microsoft Surface.
Check out the video below. What do you think? Are you ready to touch and feel your business applications, and are they going to make you get up and move?
(cc CodeProject)
9 Comments
All this R&D is great, but I would have hoped that it is used for more fundamental development such as getting up the next Web Report Studio Version out (and fixing issues like the back button not working in your browser). There are a whole lot of fixes that SAS should be working on rather than producing ever more complicated products that stretch the resources of tech support.
Hi Nick, thanks for reading and for adding the comment.
Certainly, the big splash at SAS Global Forum was about high-performance analytics, big data, and the exciting new products that are being built around those themes. But the traditional SAS products such as Base, Graph, Stat, and the BI mainstays such as EG and WRS continue to evolve as well, albeit with less accompanying press. I had a couple of other SAS Tech Talk guests who discussed some technology that you can put in your hands right now, and certainly the conference program was full of many other examples.
All of our "mainstay" products of today began as prototypes years ago, including SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and Web Report Studio. This is an important exercise for us to see what's possible and what our customers want, and we believe that it doesn't take away from our ability to maintain existing products. For example, the developer in this video (Mike) also looks after the Microsoft Outlook integration in AMO. If a problem arises in that product, he's on the hook to put down the Kinect and attend to the urgent need in the field.
This was some of the coolest technology at SGF2012 - I want one for my home!
There is great potential for enhancing data visualization with new interfaces. Mathematically speaking, what the interfaces do is increase the number of data dimensions that can be understood together. Practically speaking, the interfaces allow decision makers to access and interact with data more effectively.
No one remembers the Apple Newton (thankfully), but without it there would be no iPhone. One of these initiatives could be the iPhone of Analytics, and SAS is giving itself a great shot at coming up with it.
As for running SAS on video game consoles, don't forget that there are large clusters of PS3s out there!
There are a lot of apis and libs available to do all the kinect stuff. It is super fun and really very simple. Yes the tech works, sort of. Very glitchy and not as smooth yet, but when you are only using a 150 piece of hardware you take what you can get.
Still cool and fun.
I run SAS at home for learning more SAS on a Dell Alienware M11X which is a sub laptop gaming computer. I figure the processing and video power should help SAS run well. No problems so far.
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There is great potential for enhancing data visualization with new interfaces. Mathematically speaking, what the interfaces do is increase the number of data dimensions that can be understood together. Practically speaking, the interfaces allow decision makers to access and interact with data more effectively.
No one remembers the Apple Newton (thankfully), but without it there would be no iPhone. One of these initiatives could be the iPhone of Analytics, and SAS is giving itself a great shot at coming up with it.