What 5G will do for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

How 5G Will Affect Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

?5G is the wave of the future that mobile data users have wanted for years. 4G LTE came out around 2009 and has recently become stale as users look for smartphones and mobile networks, offering the promise of super-fast download speeds via 5G capabilities. 5G is slowly making its rollout, but perhaps not as fast as many people would like.

With 5G comes new possibilities in the application market, especially for AR and VR. The promise of fewer latency issues, faster downloads, and better user experiences mean that 5G should be the greatest thing to ever happen to AR and VR. However, severe limitations are affecting the industry that will make adoption of the technologies difficult.

Why will 5G change the VR and AR game?

There is enhanced priority for the first 5G NR (new radio) standards, which are the global standards for a unified and highly capable 5g wireless air interface. The development of 5G NR standards is centered on eMBB or enhanced mobile broadband. 5G brings improved download and upload speeds coupled with lower latency when compared to 4G LTE. The new eMBB specifications for 5G NR benefit every application that includes rich media content, but the implications for advancements in VR and AR applications are promising and not fully realized.

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) are a highly anticipated component of 5G NR published by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which is the standards body of 5G NR. The impetus behind URLLC is the implementation of latency-sensitive cases focusing on self-driving or autonomous vehicles as well as robot-enabled surgical practices. URLLC calls for just 1ms latency, down from an average of 52.3ms on LTE cells. The current plan is for 5G networks to offer users a maximum of 4ms latency, with 1ms as the goal. In contrast, in 2019, Sprint offered an astounding 55.1ms on its 4G LTE network.

It’s more than likely that the average latency on 5G networks will soar higher than the projected standard, with 1ms being more of a best-case scenario. With this in understanding, URLLC leaves itself room to improve latency going forward. This is ideal for VR headset users who may suffer from motion sickness with specific head movements, occurring from a delay between action and response due to high latencies. When latencies are lowered, and the motion sickness effect is minimized, AR and VR will likely become more widespread, with users spending more time using headsets and applications.

How will 5G influence AR and VR applications?

5G mobile networks are still in the early days of development and circulation. Many new smartphones on the market do not carry 5G functionality yet. This delay in release puts up a barrier to the widespread adoption of AR and VR applications. One major obstacle is that not every 5G network is made equal. In some Asian countries, 5G depends on sub-6 GHz radio frequencies, while many 5G networks in the US only use millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. Sub-6 GHz 5G is innately better than mmWave, but as it is not readily available in the US, the top speed is significantly lower than if you were in parts of Asia.

The difficulty with mmWave is that it requires many smaller, lower range cell towers to provide faster speed capacity, which increases the cost of deployment. mmWave often has difficulty working around large obstructions like buildings because it requires line-of-sight connectivity with lower range cell towers. This obstacle restricts the capabilities and practicality of AR and VR applications on 5G networks, especially in urban environments.

While AR and VR face roadblocks on 5G networks, 5G does provide more options for applications when used without reliable Wi-Fi signals. The potential download speeds of 5G mean that developers can implement new AR integrations into their products.

How does 5G need to change to impact AR and VR applications better?

In the US, most mobile data plans that advertise unlimited connectivity start throttling users around the 22 or 23GB point per billing cycle. While some carriers offer programs with higher throttling limits, this still poses a severe problem to the adoption of AR and VR applications on 5G networks.

Unless carriers start offering reasonably priced, unlimited data plans without hidden limitations, consumers will only experience frustration as 5G brings them to their data limits faster. Current data plans need to evolve to allow for higher data consumption if carriers hope to gain and retain customers in the 5G market. This will also boost the adoption of new, 5G AR and VR applications. Currently, AR and VR serve as fast ways to consume your data, which is something the industry doesn’t want and can’t afford.