XR: the Fifth Generation
The biggest developments about to augment our reality aren’t in display technology, but networking.
Another January, another post-holiday mellow abruptly shattered by CES, the tech industry’s annual orgy of new gadgets in Sin City. I tried avoiding CES like the plague that it is — two hundred and fifty thousand sleep-deprived, hungover execs trapped together in a germ-laden petrie dish that only the heartiest of us can avoid getting deathly ill from — yet again with no success. Every year, there’s some inescapable work reason.
This year’s reason was to continue building a business around Unity’s ad platform. We reach over a billion people every month, so that’s awesome; and now that we deliver AR ad units, brands have a novel way of reaching audiences with an interactive format that’s far more engaging than video. Many of the world’s biggest brands and the largest ad agencies attend the conference in force, so we knew we had to be there.
Aside from attending CES to do business together, we went, all 250k of us more or less, to see new tech on display on the expo floor. And there was a lot of cool new stuff. Mostly cars… which are rapidly becoming not-cars, as they morph into mobile web browsers/entertainment centers/game consoles (and I believe, someday, holographic videoconferencing devices).
But I didn’t come to see cars. I came for two things: XR and 5G. The last several years of CES have featured VR and AR hardware in large numbers; this one was being being touted as the breakthrough year for 5G networking. I’m beyond excited for the potential 5G brings to XR: lower latency and fatter pipes means less waiting and richer content. So I was eager to get the lowdown on the what, when, where, who and how that will will make 5G happen.
Fun and Gloating in Las Vegas
One afternoon, wedged between several talks and a host of client and partner meetings, I took time to walk the expo floor. It’s not something that I usually like to do (I typically get overwhelmed after twenty minutes), but this year, it was actually quite fun, because I got to play tech reporter. My longtime XR partner in crime and sometimes attorney Mark Pesce invited me to co-host an episode of his podcast, The Next Billion Seconds. In his show-within-a-podcast called The Next Billion Gadgets, Mark takes a look at all the nifty new toys.
Mark and I donned our Cybershoes (those were an actual thing this year) and walked the floor for a couple of hours looking for anything cool, new or downright weird to try out. We found some great stuff; you can hear the entire podcast on iTunes here.
Our final stop was the Mantis Vision booth, where we had a chance to see the latest in volumetric human capture. This is a space that Mark and I have been bullish on for a while now, as discussed in a previous episode of the podcast. We had a short exchange with one of their business reps Addy, wherein he laid out a future of volumetric content captured in near-real-time by Mantis Vision and delivered via 5G. Here’s a clip of that chat, and my subsequent banter with Mark about the general promise of 5G as it relates to XR.
5G — So Where We At?
It should be clear from our conversation that I’m bullish on this 5G thing. Partners I spent time with at the show seemed to feel the same way. I gave a keynote speech to a room of Publicis Groupe principals and their clients, along with my pal Keith Soljacich from Digitas, and 5G was a recurring theme in our discussion. Post-CES, Keith laid out his vision for a 5G-connected XR universe nicely in this Adweek 360 article:
But apparently, the reality of 5G today is quite different from our hopes and expectations. There was plenty of talk at CES in the form of keynotes and press; but few actual products on display at the expo. Industry players are jockeying for position. Rollouts are spotty. Go-to-market strategies span in-home, mobile and enterprise. Nobody can actually agree on what 5G, the technology, actually is. Use cases, to the extent they have been articulated, seem murky. As a result, most of the rest of us are just confused. In short, 5G seems to be lumbering through the beginning stages of a hype cycle.
But we’ve seen this movie before, and a lot of us are confident that it’s going to end well. Like 4G before it, 5G will survive the bumps of the next few years and become ubiquitous over the next three to five. (Okay maybe a little longer… but one can dream.) In the meantime, there’s nothing to stop us from envisioning how 5G and XR will come together to make something great and completely new.
The Backbone of the Metaverse
I don’t want to overstate this, but I think I’m more excited about 5G than anything else right now. XR and 5G are two great tastes that go great together. 5G may just get XR over top in adoption, and in the process, XR will provide killer use cases that 5G needs in order to stick.
At the highest level, 5G brings two big improvements: low latency and higher throughput. Things take less time to show up, and we can download orders of magnitude more stuff in the same time as with a 4G connection. Let’s look at just a few of the areas where this will impact XR:
- Rich, endless games and worlds. Fast downloads means less user frustration and better install conversion; fatter pipes means more complex 3D models, textures and animations. Updates become easy and near-instant. Single player, multiplayer, cinematic and social XR all stand to get a huge boost.
- Cloud gaming and cloud rendering. As the pipes get bigger, the devices are tending to get smaller and thus could be limited in terms of client-side processing power. 5G, especially if it drags the deployment of edge computing along with it, can help power stunning consumer and enterprise XR on a range of devices by running rich apps on powerful servers in the cloud and on the edge.
- Streaming 360 video. Bandwidth has been a severe limiter on the consumption of 360 video — so much so that folks have been experimenting with hacks (IMO) such as 180 video, which is much more bandwidth friendly. (That’s only half the story; on the production side, 360 also has the “where do I put the cameras and lights?” problem, since everything in the scene gets captured, including the recording gear.) At a 1Gb/minute or more, delivering 360 in either mono or stereo has been prohibitive; that’s even true on a desktop. 5G could make this situation way better and help 360 become an everyday media type.
- Volumetric capture. This new production technique for capturing people, environments and objects gets better and better, but consumption is a limiting factor. While our devices and content engines are capable of rendering the results beautifully in real-time, the captured models, textures and videos are very big. 5G would make this limitation a thing of the past.
- The AR Cloud. Proponents of the AR Cloud imagine a near future where the physical and digital blend seamlessly, and where a mere gesture or aiming the camera at a thing in the real world instantly brings us more information and fun. This vision — and it is mostly that, a set of related concepts and not a working platform yet — requires 3D engine technology, web browsers, machine learning, computer vision, and a fast, fat network to all come together. When it finally arrives, the AR Cloud will be backed by a 5G network.
If you think this is all too much of a flight of fancy, let’s take a moment to reflect on what life was like before and after 4G. A lot of what we do on our phones today wouldn’t be possible if we hadn’t upgraded the networks. During the early days of the 4G rollout, there were big tales being spun involving the future of video, games and social media. Well, those visions have largely come true. 4G made the mobile phone what it is today, and we wouldn’t be where we are as a society without it.
At the same time, if back then someone had told me that in seven to ten years, people would be watching movies primarily on their devices, and live-streaming concerts from their phones to a close group of friends, I would have laughed it off. I’ve always been bullish on new tech, but that would have seemed a bridge too far at the time. And yet, look at the change that 4G has engendered over that period. Is it so crazy to think that 5G isn’t going to lead to something just as amazing and transformative?
XR and 5G are not only going to help each other, but together represent a potential flashpoint that truly ushers in a much-anticipated next wave in computing that many are expecting with immersive technology. Whether it’s to deliver lush synthetic virtual worlds, hefty volume captures of live performances, high-resolution AR marketing content, or faithful digital twins of industrial equipment, the convergence of these two technologies is going to be explosive. Here’s hoping for a rapid and smooth rollout of the next wave.
