Ericsson Technology Review Magazine 2023 – Spotlight on extended reality

There is increasing consensus in our industry that extended reality (XR) – an umbrella term that covers immersive technologies ranging from virtual reality (VR) to augmented reality (AR) – could be the next paradigm shift after the smartphone. Since the network requirements of advanced XR use cases differ significantly from those of mobile broadband (MBB), there is every reason to believe that this shift will have a transformative impact on the communication industry. Ericsson is working closely with leading players around the world to shape the market and ensure that 3GPP technology is relevant in the XR ecosystem.

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May 16, 2023

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Step into a world of extended reality

Extended reality – A world of new challenges and opportunities

Many smartphone users have already experienced basic forms of AR by using the camera filters in apps like Snapchat and playing games like Pokémon Go. AR technology becomes much more powerful, however, when it is used with specialized devices such as AR glasses and other types of head-mounted displays (HMDs). AR HMDs transform the user interaction by freeing up the user’s hands and making it easy to overlay information om top of the real world – capabilities that have been shown to increase worker efficiency dramatically. By making the internet available and integrated with the real world in near real-time, more advanced forms of XR will have the potential to deliver an even more immersive user experience.

The main benefit of AR glasses and other HMDs is that they transform the user interaction by moving the interface up and away from the user’s hands, allowing them to become immersed in the experience. In a workplace environment, AR HMDs benefit from the ability to have information overlaid on the real world while simultaneously having one’s hands free, which has been shown to increase worker efficiency dramatically.

For simple AR applications that are already on the market today, such as digital overlays that help with street directions, current networks are sufficient. However, as XR applications become more advanced, the connectivity requirements will become more stringent. Introducing XR traffic in mobile networks puts high pressure on processing and transmission bitrates across the whole communication chain, which has an impact on the uplink, downlink and latency requirements. This shift will require high-performance networks with increased capacity, more uplink throughput and bounded latency. To support XR use cases, future networks will need to have the ability to handle a wide range of applications with varying streaming, spatial-mapping and edge-compute requirements simultaneously.

We hope this special issue of our magazine helps you and your organization gain a better understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities that XR presents for your business. Please feel free to share it with your colleagues and partners. You can find both PDF and HTML versions of all the articles here.

Future network requirements for extended reality applications

The rapid development of extended reality (XR) technologies and devices has major implications for mobile networks. Communication service providers (CSPs) will need enhanced network capabilities to deliver the low latency, high reliability and high data rates that are essential to sustain user quality of experience (QoE) in XR applications, while simultaneously offloading computation from the device to an edge or cloud server. In this article, we share their projections regarding how the network requirements of XR applications, devices and computation offloading variants are likely to evolve over time.

Network evolution to support extended reality applications

To meet the stringent requirements of XR applications related to latency, reliability and bitrates, mobile networks must evolve to include time-critical communication features, and many deployments will need to be densified. Our research indicates that delay-aware scheduling and robust link adaptation are effective techniques to meet XR requirements in the near term. As network densification is a complex and time-consuming process, we recommend that developers of XR applications requiring full coverage design their applications in such a way that they can adapt to varying network conditions.

Figure 1: AR use cases and their requirements on the glasses ranked by importance (+ to +++)

Holographic communication in 5G networks

The emergence of lightweight augmented reality (AR) glasses and powerful 3D compression algorithms have made it possible to start deploying AR use cases using existing 5G technology. In this article, a team of Ericsson researchers demonstrate the feasibility of using 5G networks for holographic communication – an important step toward the Internet of Senses. Our approach makes it possible to move high performance computing to the network and thereby reduce both the energy consumption of mobile devices and the end-to-end latency.

Figure 1; Split architecture options with 5G connectivity

XR and 5G: Extended reality at scale with time-critical communication

One of the many benefits of 5G networks is the critical role they can play in enabling XR applications. With the capability to offload most XR processing from the device to the mobile network edge, 5G networks make it possible to take XR applications to a whole new level with head-mounted displays (HMDs) that are much lighter and more cost-efficient. By gradually introducing time-critical communication capabilities into their 5G networks, CSPs have the opportunity to enable XR at a large scale.

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