What makes a vacation for you? Do you need to feel the sand between your toes? Maybe sip a caipirinha on the Copacabana? Or see a show in London’s West End? Or are you the adventurous type and want to know what it’s like to climb Everest in your spare time? Or walking with dinosaurs on a prehistoric safari (after walking the dog, of course)?
Thanks to emerging and future technologies such as extended reality, immersive holographic communication and the Internet of the senses, these possibilities could all be available to you very soon in the place of your choice, all thanks to powerful mobile technologies. and drivers of innovation.
Ready to take your first VR vacation? Here are five ways 5G, Advanced 5G and 6G could very soon bring the world to your doorstep:
Visit from your couch
Imagine hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu as it would have been in the 15th century. Or scale the thousands of torii gates of Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine in unspoiled isolation, apart from your own personal virtual guide of course.
With ultra-low latency and the ability to support multiple high-performance devices with centimeter-precise positioning, 5G and future networks can turn these possibilities into reality, or rather new immersive virtual and augmented realities.
Ericsson’s recent blog post on where 5G metaverse is used takes you through some of the exciting ways it can change the way you work, learn, socialize, shop and even travel. Today, most tourist services are only available in a few main languages and are not always available when you want them. Visiting a mix of physical and virtual attractions could change that. It can also enable new ways to open up tourist attractions to a wider audience, making them more accessible and perhaps even more enjoyable.
Currently there are 1154 UN World Heritage sites, many of which can be expensive and difficult to access, and when you arrive you can expect to be greeted by swarms of other tourists. But what if you could visit each of them in all their unspoilt glory, and with a bespoke VR guide? Ericsson is already well on its way to making this immersive AR storytelling a reality through its augmented reality platform EPHAS, which addresses both the creative and consumer side of immersive AR storytelling while democratizing AR storytelling.
So whether you’re vacationing from your couch or on location, emerging augmented reality and virtual reality can offer new ways to make those experiences truly unforgettable.
Take your seat before the start of the show
Perhaps you are a musical tourist and your idea of a vacation is a pilgrimage to distant stages to follow your favorite artists? 5G-enabled technologies could also improve this.
Technologies such as extended reality and holographic communication provide a toolkit that could revolutionize your live music experience in the future, for example taking the stage yourself in virtual reality (as recently demonstrated at Madrid’s Mad Cool Festival) or even sharing the experience remotely in real time, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from the action.
In his blog post on the future of concerts, Ericsson’s Michael Björn argues that while VR concerts can be too detrimental to the interest of concerts (i.e. connecting with performers on stage and people around you), the potential to combine physical and digital experiences could be much more appealing.
So imagine this: instead of traveling to those remote locations to catch your favorite artists, what if you could share the same experience from your local concert hall using a live holographic representation of, say, Bruce Springsteen, merged from seamless way with local musicians. ? What if that same global music event could be simulcast to hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, while providing you with an environment to bounce to your favorite songs and interact with like-minded fans?
Do you think that’s too far fetched? Think again, because it’s already happening today thanks to ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and his band of pioneer avatars (or ABBAtars in ABBA parlance). Already, this concept offers the benefits of making concerts more accessible to a wider audience, as well as reducing emissions associated with travel and the risk of superspreader events.
Feel the thrill of the stadium
This summer, the world has become populated with wheelchair football and track and field fanatics, boosted by the Women’s Soccer Championships in Europe and North America, and the World Championships in Athletics in Oregon, USA . While diehard fans will have had the pleasure of heading to the events themselves, much of the moral support has been filled by couch experts like me watching from home on a 2D flat screen. . But surely there must be some sort of in-between?
With 5G, yes. Augmented and virtual reality, and even tactile immersion, offer new ways for armchair fans to immerse themselves in real-time events happening miles away.
As Penny Schröder-Smith says in her Future of Sports blog: “Sports and gamers are poised to enter the home itself through augmented and virtual reality. It doesn’t matter if season tickets are hard to come by or if a stadium is inaccessible to some fans. In the future, every seat will be the best seat in the house thanks to immersive technology, which will bridge the current gap between the stadium and the home experience.
Germany is a market ahead of the curve to test these possibilities. This summer, a so-calledinnovation game” supported by Deutsche Telekom and played between Bundesliga’s FC Köln and Serie A’s AC Milan demonstrated how this can be brought to market as a new mainstream offering, through immersive augmented reality replays enabled by moving cameras and player-worn bodies cams. This example builds on previous 5G augmented reality fan experience trials such as 5G SIM-enabled cameras and immersive AR fan apps that provide imagery, stats, and match analysis as an AR overlay in real time.
Learn local lingo in real time
For me, going on vacation is about getting off the beaten tourist track and immersing yourself in the local scene, culture and language.
Now, with VR-assisted blended learning, you can find whatever you’re looking for from the comfort of your own home. Today, there are many virtual reality language learning apps available in the market that allow you to put your foreign language to the test in tricky real-life situations and without the pressure of tripping or stuttering. . And all the while, you can get real-time feedback on your pronunciation and delivery.
So who knows, maybe the next time you go on vacation, you’ll want to get out of your old “Lei parla inglese” comfort zone?
And if you don’t have the time or talent to learn the language but still want to stay in touch with your friends, 5G’s low latency now even makes it possible to automate translation simultaneously in real time without lag or delay. This technology is already available today both in the cloud, through powerful voice-to-text and voice-to-speech translation engines enabled by AI, and even integrated into 5G-enabled devices thanks to powerful processors, as in testifies Qualcomm.
Revisit your favorite places on demand
What if technology could make every spatial, haptic, and other sensory aspect of your all-time favorite places available on demand in an instant? So instead of scrolling through vacation snaps, you could transcend the space where your physical and digital perceptions would be merged; a space where you will literally smell the surrounding environment or hear nearby sounds with full spatial effect – like the smell of a warm evening breeze or the crashing of the waves as the tide rises.
Ericsson calls it the Internet of the Senses and in its latest consumer trends report, it even designed hybrid reality shopping malls of the future where all of this will take place, also known as the ‘everyday plaza’. .
Ericsson’s Sara Thorson dives deeper into this world of immersive experiences with XR in her recent blog post, in which she predicts that the digital and physical worlds will eventually become increasingly indistinguishable from each other:
“Like deep fake videos that deceive the eye and ear with realistic copies, which can be both entertaining and frightening, the blending of digital and reality can also bring us fantastic and unrealistic additions to our lives. The point is that digital or remote visuals, such as rendered objects or holographic video with spatial sound and even the ability to touch, will be integrated into our physical context of reality.
This year, British service provider EE set a milestone on that flight path when it created an immersive digital tour of rainforests, digitally enhanced freshwater and saltwater worlds in central London. . Known as the Green Planet AR Experience, EE demonstrated the ability of autonomous 5G and edge computing to recreate powerful virtual worlds where the seasons change and animal and plant life can be rendered in real time.
So with all of that in mind, and exciting immersive reality use cases in development and on the horizon, your next vacation might just be powered by 5G.
explore more
Visit Ericsson’s learning pages on Extended Reality, Immersive Holographic Communication and the Internet of the Senses.
Take a tour of the 12 unexpected places of use in the 5G metaverse of the future.
Learn about immersive augmented reality storytelling and the impact of connectivity on digital and real-world experiences.
Visit Ericsson Consumer Lab’s Merged Reality Future Square.
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