How holograms and private wireless are powering the metaverse
The consumer metaverse gets a lot of attention these days. But, in fact, there are even bigger opportunities in the enterprise and industrial metaverse. Enabled by a confluence of network, communication, and cloud technologies, the metaverse empowers companies to shift expensive, time-intensive activities into a fully virtual world, while providing an always-on platform for real-time interactive and immersive experiences.
These immersive experiences give users the perception of being a part of either a digital representation of their daily work environment or may even create a completely different virtual world. This could be facilitated with technology like 360° HD video cameras, 3D audio devices, Virtual Reality (VR) goggles and holograms.
Today, we already use Facetime, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and many other video platforms in our daily life at work and at home. But, how about Holograms? Remember Holograms from Hollywood movies? Holograms will give us a unique experience with details that are not possible with video and without using VR headsets!
At the Nokia and Verizon Boston 5G Innovation event held in late 2022, we demonstrated a live Hologram over a state-of-the-art Private Wireless Network.
A Hologram is a virtual 3D image formed by the interference of light beams reflecting from the real physical objects and people. Holograms can be used in healthcare, defense, education, and many other industries.
With holographic technology, doctors and surgeons can process body images and convert them into 3D images with advanced depth and views. This enhances diagnostics and improves treatment plans.
In education, holograms can make learning and teaching so much easier, especially now with hybrid learning taking off. It can help to bring in more conceptual clarity, enable visualization of abstract concepts, and ensure efficient communication between learners and educators.
In defense, holographic technology will allow soldiers to see through smoke and around corners and will enable 3D terrain maps projected onto their field of vision at the click of a button.
All these use cases can be enabled with state-of-the-art Private Wireless technology which provides higher bandwidths, faster speeds, broader coverage, and most importantly lower latency. Latency is the lag we see sometimes during video streams and video calls. For certain use cases such as recording and streaming previously recorded events, higher latency may be perfectly acceptable, but with real-time video communications, virtual reality, and holography, having a high latency can have a significant impact on user experience.
More importantly high latency can be unsafe in many industrial applications and result in low productivity. For example, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) will not work with high latency which would cause very low driving and reaction speeds.
Low latency is enabled with a safe, secure, and reliable 5G Private Wireless network which delivers high performance and provides an excellent user experience. A way to achieve this is to keep as much computation – like data analytics, video processing and automated decision making – as possible locally at the edge.
Wait, then you don’t use the Cloud? Keeping the network locally means to leverage Mobile Edge computing, bringing the cloud to the edge. If you are a manufacturer, you compute and leverage your local applications on premise to reduce latency, increase speed and enhance cyber security.
Below is a link to the video of Nokia and Verizon demonstrating a live holographic experience powered by the leading-edge Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) with Mission-critical Industrial Edge (MXIE). Nokia DAC is used by Verizon to enable Private Wireless networking. Nokia DAC is an as-a-service platform featuring high-performance, industrial-grade private wireless connectivity and edge computing. It is easy to setup and offers high throughout, low latency and enables digitization and IoT automation – for up to 800 users per access point, even in a challenging RF environment. This results into 5-10 times fewer pieces of radio equipment compared to Wi-Fi.
The industrial metaverse is closer than you may think. Private wireless can enhance your operations experience in manufacturing, ports, mining, education, healthcare or any other vertical. The number of possible use cases is endless.
For more information contact your Nokia or Verizon sales representative. Or visit the Nokia private wireless webpage.
