In previous articles, we talked about what 5G is and why mmWave technology is so important to its development. We now move on to describe the specific capabilities that users will have with the advent of the 5G era, and talk about how the simple processes we are used to can change in the near future. One such process is social interaction and online shopping. 4G networks gave us streaming, and with them mobile devices got completely new features, but now it's time for artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR) - these technologies use 5G networks to take another step into the future.
The evolution of social interactions on the web
Already now we can take a smartphone or tablet, look at the reviews of other visitors about cafes and restaurants nearby and choose where we will have dinner. If we enable location detection, we can see the distance to each of the points, sort the establishments by popularity or distance, and then open the map application to get ourselves a convenient route. In the 5G era, everything will become much easier. It will be enough just to raise a smartphone with 5G support to eye level and βscanβ your surroundings. All nearby restaurants will be marked on the screen along with information about the menu, ratings and reviews of visitors, and handy signs will tell you the shortest way to any of them.
How is this possible? In fact, your smartphone at this moment shoots a video in high resolution and sends it to the "cloud" for analysis. High resolution in this case is important for the accuracy of object identification, but this creates a large load on the network due to the amount of information transmitted. More precisely, it would, if not for the data transfer speed and the huge bandwidth of 5G networks.
The second βingredientβ that makes this technology possible is low latency. With the spread of 5G networks, users will notice that similar prompts on their smartphone screens will appear faster, almost instantly. When the captured video is uploaded to the cloud, the 5G-enabled image recognition system already begins to select among all the observed buildings those that match the user's request, that is, restaurants with a high rating. After processing the data, these results will be sent back to the smartphone, where the augmented reality subsystem will superimpose them on the image received from the camera and display them in the appropriate places on the screen. And that's what the minimum delay is for.
Another good example is using 5G to create shared stories and content. Now, for example, shooting a video and uploading these files to social networks are two separate tasks. If you are at a family reunion, birthday or wedding, each of the guests uploads photos and video clips from the event on their Facebook or Instagram pages, and there are no βcommonβ features like the ability to simultaneously apply filters to the frame they like or co-edit the video. And after the holiday, you will be able to find all the pictures and videos taken only if each of the participants uploaded them with some unique and common tag for all. And still, they will be scattered across the pages of your friends and relatives, and not collected in one common album.
With 5G technologies, you can easily combine photo and video files of your loved ones into a single project and work on it together, and project participants will immediately upload their files to the public and process them in real time! Imagine that you are out of town for the weekend, and each member of the trip has instant access to all the pictures and clips that you manage to take during the trip.
To implement such a project, several factors are needed at once: a very high data transfer rate, low latency and a large network bandwidth! Transferring high-definition video is heavy on the network, but with 5G it will happen almost instantly. Processing files in real time can be a slow and complicated process if multiple people are working on them at once. But the speed and bandwidth of 5G networks will also help remove the delay and freezes that would appear when cropping photos or applying new filters. In addition, AI can help with your projects. For example, your 5G-enabled device will automatically identify your friends and family in pictures or videos and invite them to process these files together.
The evolution of online shopping
Finding and buying a new sofa is not an easy task. Before you go to a furniture store (or website) to get it, you need to decide on the place where the sofa will stand in the room, measure the free space, think about how it will fit with the rest of the situation ...
5G technologies will help simplify this process. Thanks to a 5G smartphone, you will no longer need a tape measure and questions whether the sofa you like in the store is combined with a coffee table and carpet color. It is enough to download the dimensions of the sofa and its characteristics from the official website of the manufacturer, and a three-dimensional model of the sofa will appear on the smartphone screen, which you can βplaceβ in the room yourself and immediately understand whether this model is right for you.
How is this possible? The camera on your 5G smartphone, in this case, will help the AI ββmeasure the parameters of the room to determine if there is enough room for a new sofa. Rajan Patel, CTO of Google Augmented Reality, used the Google Lens app at the 2018 Snapdragon Tech Summit to do just that. At the same time, he demonstrated how the data transfer speed of 5G networks is important for fast loading of the furniture model and textures. And after downloading, augmented reality technologies allow you to place a βvirtualβ sofa in a place chosen by the user, and its dimensions will be 100% the same as those indicated on the site. And the user will only have to decide for himself whether to proceed to the next step - the purchase.
We believe that the 5G era will improve and complement communication, online shopping and other aspects of our lives, and routine tasks (even those that we are not yet aware of) will become easier and more enjoyable.
Source: habr.com