THE 5G UI REVOLUTION
Tris Tolliday describes his vision of a web UI catapulted forwards by 5G
First published in net magazine 16/04/2020
5G is a data revolution about to change every aspect of modern life, connecting everyone in real-time with unparalleled flows of data. For web developers, 5G UI is set to revolutionise the web GUI equilibrium… as soon as it has the national coverage we see with 4G.
The web has been stuck in a 2D world with the same top nav, hero and boxes of content, but what if there was another way? What if the client didn’t have to rely on the users’ hardware to deliver the experience, and instead we hoisted it up to the cloud?
WHY IS 5G ANY DIFFERENT?
5G has two benefits over 4G. The first is latency small enough for everything to feel responsive, with early tests from Verizon hitting the 30ms mark (10x quicker than the mobile browser touch delay), and that figure is expected to come down to around 10ms. Second is its insane bandwidth, which at 2gbits per second, is large enough to push the heavy lifting away from the client and onto the server.
From the server, we’ve seen what is possible with the likes of Google Stadia, Steam Remote Play and Project xCloud. All of a sudden, graphic-intense 3D games are available for the public to play in 4K on their living room TV, assuming a decent broadband speed.
Now imagine what is possible if we extend access to every pay monthly mobile phone in the UK. 5G would enable everyone in the UK to use their phone to browse content generated by bleeding-edge cloud computers. We aren’t talking about the SSR of today, but the whole GUI being painted server-side, and pushed to devices in real-time.
Let’s also consider the limitations of the modern browser. Sure we can create graphics on them, but without heavy optimisation, anything too complex begins to chug. If you have ever attempted 3D on the browser, the limitations hit you pretty early on.
CLOUD COMPUTING IN THE ADVENT OF AI
Meanwhile, sat on the cloud, are a quite frankly insane amount of GPUs, among other resources. This is thanks to huge investment in AI and machine learning, these GPUs are twiddling their thumbs waiting for researchers and data scientists to create their next facial recognition or speech-to-text model.
We can see this happening, because Google Collab offers out free time on its dedicated GPUs and TPUs for ML projects that won’t take up its resources for more than a day. These spare GPUs are gagging to be utilised, and 5G UI would help this cross section of wants.
HOW COULD THIS WORK?
We can take hints from Steam Remote Play, which utilises H.264 (and H.265 for the brave), to stream a video capture from your home computer in real-time, meanwhile your mobile device streams touch events directly to your computer. What’s incredible to me, is that your mobile has very little to do in this exchange. It displays a video stream, which mobiles have been capable of since at least 2005. It also just sends any input events to the server, not even concerning itself with computing what these events mean.
This leads to the bigger question: what stack do we run on the server? To this, my answer is anything at all. If it can run on the cloud, you can do it, it doesn’t even have to be browser tech, which leads me to the best bit.
WEB 3.0
Now we have zero limitations, it’s time for the web revolution. What does a website look like in 3D or in 2D with 4K graphics? I cannot even fathom what those more creative than me can come up with.
All this has led me to one conclusion, it’s time for front-end developers to expand their horizons, and not necessarily on the web. Build cloud native experiences, invest your time in VR and AR. Try Unity, try unreal, be bold.
There’s an old adage that comes into its own: ‘If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevant even more’. Get ready for a 5G revolution — change, evolve, or be ready for irrelevance.
