5G: engaging sports fans with exhilarating virtual reality experiences
by Kishore Jethanandani
The Winter Olympics 2018 in PyeongChang, South Korea, was a technological spectacle as much as it was a sports extravaganza for the first time in history. Sports fans experienced the events in physical and virtual reality for multi-angle views and emotional immersion.
A pilot, an EU-South Korea collaborative project called 5G Champion, was testing for innovative infrastructural elements to achieve the data transfer speeds, latencies, picture quality, and bandwidth, that would ensure consumer experiences to fulfill the promise of virtual reality.
Immersive virtual experiences
Virtual Reality is meant to overcome the physical constraints to fans experiencing games from any angle and in any arena of their choosing. Ubiquitous cameras capture the action on the field not just with a handful of media cameras, with a few lines of sight, but sweeping 360 degrees views with the option to zero down on the action at any given moment in the game. 5G made it possible — albeit still a few baby steps. A raft of glitches needs to be ironed out for widespread adoption.
Video with six degrees of freedom brings much richer experiences that capture the live movements spanning the dimensional diversity of orientation and distance of an arena from vantage points as varied as those from drones and the headsets of players. Viewers, virtually dropped to the ground, have visceral experiences in the vortex of the whirlwinds of the game.
New demands on networks
Virtual Reality raises the bar for network performance before it can deliver the exhilarating experiences it promises. Bandwidth used for virtual reality rises to over 200 Mbps, the limit for 4G, with 360 degrees video content with resolutions more than 8K and higher frame rates per second of 90 or more. Stereoscopic views need separate streams for the left and the right eye, HDR (High Dynamic Range) with photorealistic video needs much higher color fidelity. The bandwidth needs for video with six degrees of freedom is higher at up to 1 Gbps.
Fans frequently change the field of view of the displayed content on their head-mounted devices and delays in refreshing it would disorient them. Experiments have shown that latencies of less than 15 milliseconds are needed before users will not notice the lag. Any discontinuity in the flow of the video stream is jarring for viewers immersed in the game at the least and can have physical effects at worst.
5G’s promises and perils
5G, with its bandwidth and speed of data delivery, will insulate fans from the shocks of sub-optimal network service delivery. 4G is not able to achieve less than 20 milliseconds of latency. 5G, on the other hand, can go as low as one millisecond of latency.
The mass use of virtual reality further strains 4G as increasing numbers of users overwhelm it with traffic. 5G, operating in the millimeter spectrum in the 24 GHz to 300 GHz range, can accommodate massive volumes of data traffic with numerous streams flowing in parallel as a result of the higher frequencies. Field trials have reported achieving data traffic of up to 10 GHz.
The equipment that allows more streams to flow is MIMO (Multiple Input and Multiple Output). Unlike 4G base stations which have about a dozen ports, 5G base stations have a hundred of them. The challenge of commercializing MIMO is to have hundreds of streams of data flowing without bumping into each other and causing interference.
Signals split into microbeams and transmitted by an array of antennas, reduce the noise caused by interference. These antennas go with the dense deployment of microcells that will be a cornerstone of 5G. While the parallel flow of beams, each from a single antenna, improve the quality of the overall signal, they travel over short distances before they lose power.
Beamforming technologies interlink shorter length microbeams so that they reach their users. Shorter length microbeams have the advantage of flexible routing on-demand. Intelligent technologies, with help from GPS, depth sensing, and more, can find an optimal route to bounce them from antennas best positioned to serve them at the location of the user without running into objects or adverse weather that block their smooth flow.
Users in motion will typically consume virtual reality applications, and their field of view will change repeatedly. Short-range beams adapt to their changing needs.
5G Champion project at the 2018 Olympics was a chance to test the algorithms that optimize the flow of traffic across the several moving parts in the delivery of VR streams to the users. SDN controllers coordinate the traffic flow from the cameras to 5G resources at the edge, the VNFs (Virtualized Network Functions) for storage, the computing resources, and the applications, with the radio network. More than anything else, the SDN controller is optimized to manage the movement of the many beams that deliver the virtual reality content to the final headset.
The several moving parts in the 5G architecture complicate its financial viability even if technically it is coming to fruition.5G adoption for virtual reality awaits the technical and financial results from the launch at the 2018 Olympics in February 2018.
The results of the kickoff of 5G virtual reality at 2018 PyeongChang 2018 Olympics will be on full display in the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 with the full capabilities of the technology at work. Fans will view the games in 8K video streams.
Conclusions
The jury is still out whether the audience will be delighted enough to pay for the experience.
