I was at the TechXLR8 event in London last week, primarily to keep up to date with the developments in 5G as part of my work for the TM Forum, you can see my blog post for them here.
One thing that struck me about the whole event was how many VR headsets were in evidence. After the disappointment that was 3D TV Virtual Reality seems to be really catching the imagination. Some people have suggested that the need to wear glasses was the problem with 3D TV, if that is the case then VR is surely going to be shorter lived? The staggering numbers quoted by BT (250K people tried their free VR coverage of a major sporting event, using a cardboard holder for their phone) suggest otherwise.
Talking to some of my former colleagues on the Nokia stand the technology is interesting in terms of the load it puts on the infrastructure. Because current solutions have to stream every possible viewing angle to every device they were talking nearly 90% of the data being thrown away. If we can have the device report the viewing angle then we can render and stream just the view needed, it seems Bell Labs have proven that the latency needs to be below a certain target to avoid motion sickness.
There are many other use cases for VR, but I have to say, given the share of disposable income that a large number of people are prepared to pay from premium sports experiences, and the huge indirect revenue advertising platform it provides, sport looks like it could be a very interesting driver for the technology.
To deliver VR to a mass audience we are going to need some very low latency access, and some powerful edge computing to do the rendering. The infrastructure usage will be incredibly peaky, so we’ll need this all to be cloud native so we can scale it up for the few hours a week we need it. Oh and we’ll need slicing to manage the QoS challenge.
5G delivers all of this and more, and maybe it will be the mass adoption use case (“killer app” we used to call them) that drives adoption of the technology.