How Virtual Reality, Autonomous Vehicles and Telecom Giants Will Work Together
Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality and Autonomous vehicles are a match made in heaven. At first thought, it doesn’t make sense, what does an entertainment based product (AVM Device) and a self-driving car have anything to do with each other, but upon closer inspection, the complementary nature of both are going to become more and more evident.
Alibaba’s recent $18 Million investment into augmented reality car navigation startup WayRay of Switzerland is the first of many cross industry strategic investments that I predict will become more and more common in the next decade. To understand the context is to think about the shift in nature for both industries. Autonomous vehicles will be a reality in the next decade, the momentum is too strong from 113-year-old Ford Motor Company announcing its “intent to have a high-volume, fully autonomous capable vehicle in commercial operation in 2021” to 108-year-old General Motors and companies from the last few decades Google and Uber investing heavily into it as their strategic focus.
The reason is clear, an autonomous vehicle have some serious advantages over traditional cars. As Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, eloquently described the advantageous of driving in the networked age, but the essence of it was captured when he argued that “autonomous vehicles won’t curtail personal freedom — they’ll amplify it. They will let everyone pursue a greater range of activities while they’re in transit.”
That leads us to the inevitable uses between Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality technologies with autonomous vehicles:
Augmented Reality: “At the moment, WayRay is the world’s only developer that integrates augmented reality systems into cars,” Vitaly Ponomarev, company founder and CEO, said in a statement. You can bet “that moment” will not last long as the value in having scalable and tiered AR systems can be a key differentiator for auto makers. Think if Jaguar had a AR system for different models that are scalable to be customized displays that meet each of its brands luxury requirements. The AR inside a car immediately becomes part of the design of the car and that can have a lot of impact.
Virtual Reality: Autonomous cars will create a new time value that don’t exist currently. A 30-minute commute or 2-hour trip now provides a window into entertainment that never existed before. And the opportunity goes back to auto manufacturers who will want to maintain their brand equity within these new offerings. So a co-branded Sony VR headset made for a Jaguar XLJ has to provide value in comparison to a Oculus VR headset made for a Ford Fusion. These subtleties can transform the sales value of a vehicle when they the view is shifted from transportation and shared with entertainment.
Mixed Reality: MR provides value to the sales segment in general and as Tesla has noted, the best way to sell an Electric Car versus a Gasoline Car is to establish their own retail environment to educate and establish their technology with customers. MR can further accelerate this process by providing relatively new companies like Tesla further support in the sales process, but more importantly by giving a chance to established giants like Ford, GM and Chrysler to showcase their innovation.
But for all this to work there is a life current that is being established that will fuel this innovation: 5G. As ABI Research puts it:
“The true advantage of 5G in relation to AR and VR manifests itself in three components: more capacity, lower latency, and better network uniformity. Some applications rely on one component more than another, but supporting all three simultaneously is critical to enabling all AR and VR use cases under the same network.
Both AR and VR applications can be very sensitive to network performance, with any interruption having a significant negative impact on user experience, which reinforces the role of continued enhancements of mobile networks. Although current 4G networks are sufficient for some initial AR and VR applications, the introduction of 5G will strengthen existing experiences, enable novel ones, and make these experiences available for mass adoption.
Following the guidelines set by IMT-2020, 5G aims to improves on current 4G capabilities with a 10X increase in throughput, 10X decrease in latency, and 100X increase in traffic capacity. Even with expected 4G improvements, those metrics will fall short when considering mass market AR and VR uptake. 5G will not only improve, but will also be a requirement for some of the most exciting AR and VR applications.”
Without 5G, the entire AVM industry will continue to work at a slow and steady pace and the same will go for the Autonomous Vehicle Industry that will 100% rely on Tier 1 connection to meet high SLA commitments. The immediate impact to AVM is the biggest opportunity on the horizon as it will accelerate and establish consumer facing products at a rapid pace. And as you can see, the ripple effect of that is infinite. The connection to autonomous cars is only one of the hundreds of potential disruptions that will occur in the future.
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