The question of how 5G will bring about the Metaverse has come up quite frequently lately as the hype engine continues to churn ahead. Some companies today claim that 5G will revolutionize the Metaverse and allege that it is a crucial ingredient for unleashing the expansive promises of Web 3.0 and the virtual worlds that will be built on top of it.
The most obvious intersection between 5G and Metaverse occurs with virtual reality (VR). It’s obvious how VR relates to the Metaverse. VR headsets, such as Meta’s Oculus portfolio of HMD (Head Mounted Displays), are widely regarded as the primary interface to the impending self-governing virtual universe that will challenge our very existence.
Enabling Peripheral Technology for XR
What about 5G? What is the VR connection? You hear operators and mobile wireless technology companies wax poetic about how VR is one of 5G’s killer apps. It happens that 5G is not so critical for VR, especially if you consider that you will likely be indoors in the safety of your living room when you are sauntering around the Metaverse. It would be rather dangerous for you to be romping around the real world while you were navigating a virtual one. You would probably get hit by a car. You will need augmented reality (AR) of some sort to help you avoid such an unfortunate scenario.
A good way of thinking of 5G in relation to VR and AR is as a technology that will bring about new peripheral and sensory applications that will help us evolve the way we can interact with and interface cyber-physically. This idea is consistent with the thesis that I developed in the technology futures study that neXt Curve did for Ofcom, the UK’s equivalent to the FCC.
Note that I didn’t specify that it was merely connectivity or communications technology. 5G is becoming much more than just mobile wireless connectivity, which has been the primary focus of previous generations of mobile wireless technologies. As we look toward what the 3GPP calls 5G Advanced specified by Release 17 and beyond, future releases are evolving new features that are expanding the function of the radio beyond carrying data to and from your smartphone.
Passive Interface for VR
When we think of VR and 5G, most folks talk about the high bandwidth and low latency that will make wireless or standalone VR a viable reality. The latency between the VR HMD and the VR applications has historically been a problem as a round-trip lag of more than 20 milliseconds can cause “visual-to-vestibular dissonance” which many researchers theorize causes motion sickness and eventual nausea that is a staple of the VR experience.
There is no doubt that the vastly improved bandwidth, industrial-grade latency, and reliability for communication can provide a robust and massive pipe to wirelessly transport VR content and user stimuli between the workstation and HMD, but there is more to 5G than the data pipe.
Precision indoor positioning is another feature that is being developed in 5G advanced that is geared toward industrial scenarios for the tracking of mobile assets such as AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicles) and people with location trackers or a smartphone. The position of a connected object can be estimated using the angle of departure calculations from a radio used in beamforming. Precisions within centimeters are achievable in 3D and in real-time.
5G Advanced is also looking to new features that will essentially convert an array of 5G radios into a cooperative sensor that can detect the presence and location of an unconnected object or map the topography of a space. This could be useful for mapping, sensing, and geo-fencing the real environment where someone might be engaging in a VR experience.
Both 5G Advanced features have the potential to be used in improving the real-world safety of VR engagement and gameplay by providing VR systems with better locational and situational awareness of the user’s environment. No more tipping over your TV, breaking furniture, or yourself.
Active Interface for AR
Digital twins, which is the cyber-physical mirror that creates the real-time digital reflection of a unique physical thing, presents some interesting possibilities for 5G. This includes enabling the cyber-physical interfaces needed to render the AR Metaverse or digital overlay of our physical world that will be essential for future AR applications.
We already mentioned the precision positioning feature of 5G Advanced. There happens to be an outdoor version that uses two principles to determine the location of a connected device. The aforementioned angle of departure of a radio beam is one method.
The other approach is the triangulation of the location of an object in a physical space using the downlink time of arrival differential of signals transmitted from an array of radios to an endpoint device, such as a smartphone or location tracker.
Both approaches provide compelling options for how things roaming around in the physical world can be mapped to their digital twin or metamodel making digital models, that are otherwise static, dynamic, and more representative of the state and condition of the always-changing real world. I guess we can call it an AR Metaverse.
Another cool feature being specified and evolved in 5G Advanced is this thing called REDCAP, or Reduced Capability for 5GNR or 5G New Radio. The gist of REDCAP is to enable a mid-tier class of IoT devices that would operate in less constrained environments, such as a factory versus highly constrained environments like a field on a farm or a well in the middle of an oil field. In simple terms, REDCAP devices are less connectivity-intensive than a smartphone but more than a moisture sensor monitoring rainfall in a forest in South America.
Why is this cool? This means that 5G networks will eventually support a new tier of sensor devices that can help us instrument our physical world with a higher degree of fidelity and persistence than we are able to do today. This will help us hydrate a richer AR Metaverse or meta-model that will enable some cool applications in the future.
Now for the Sobering Stuff
Speaking of the future, these Metaverse-ish features of 5G might seem revolutionary. They may be, but there is a problem. Many of these potentially revolutionary capabilities are quite a ways down the road. Even if some of these features were available today, they would be prohibitively expensive for a mass consumer market. Commercialization and the broad availability of these 5G Advanced features will take years to find their way into our public and private 5G networks and to contribute to the advancement of the Metaverse.
There are great opportunities today to start ideating through the possibilities that 5G Advanced will bring to the “Metaverse.” Who knows? You might start the company or the department in your company that creates the peripheral technologies that take AR and VR to the next level. Today’s virtual and online gaming communities that have been rebranded “Metaverse” will undoubtedly take advantage.
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