21.08.2019 by Pamela Buchwald

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5G and edge computing are paving the way for new innovative industry solutions. Deutsche Telekom is supporting start-ups on their way to becoming pioneers. Part 2 of our practice series.

It all began in the summer of 2014: Armed with their smartphones, masses of people around the world combed inner cities, parks and forests in search of Pikachu and other wild digital creatures. The cause of the hype was the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, whose creators had succeeded in creating a new gaming experience for smartphones. They linked the real world with the virtual world and didn't even need data glasses. Pokémon Go simply inserts little colorful monsters into the picture of the smartphone camera – creating an AR experience.

Ever since this resounding success Augmented Reality (AR) has been regarded as a market with high growth potential: The US market researcher IDC, for example, expects AR and VR to see a total global turnover of 108 billion US dollars by 2021. And so today knights go into virtual medieval battles, wizards fight magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe and adventure-seekers plunge into wild rollercoaster rides. The imagination for (mobile) AR games is limitless, as is the gaming experience – as long as everything runs smoothly. That’s because AR games like Pokémon Go work according to the geocaching principle. Players are supposed to find and catch little monsters all over the world. The position of these monsters changes constantly and is determined by the operator of the game. In order to find the monsters, players need a fast and stable Internet connection so that they can receive the position data of the monsters.

Otherwise the game will jump or freeze – and the gamers won’t just lose their advantage over others, but also their interest in the game. An important factor here is latency, i.e. the time it takes for a signal to travel from the smartphone to the game operator and back. If the connection is too slow, applications like Pokémon Go can stall or even crash completely. To ensure that latency doesn't become a spoilsport, developers are now relying on 5G.

LATENCY PLAYS LEADING ROLE FOR MOBILE AR AND VR GAMING

The new 5G mobile communications standard is based on three key functions: high data throughput, low latencies and seamless network coverage. High download and upload rates of up to 10 Gbit/s create more scope for large amounts of data to be transported from AR and VR applications. However, the signal runtime, i.e. latency, is even more important than the sheer mass of data that a network can transmit. If the latency time in the current LTE network is between 20 and 80 milliseconds, the delay at 5G drops to 1 millisecond. Nothing jolts or stalls anymore.

Low latencies not only improve the user experience, but also eliminate the need for expensive hardware. In the future, the necessary computing power – for example for complex graphics – will no longer be on the user's smartphone, but in decentralized data centers. Edge computing makes this possible (see box). 5G and edge computing go hand in hand to achieve high performance in data transmission

5G TEST ENVIRONMENT FOR START-UPS

At Deutsche Telekom's tech incubator hub:raum in Berlin, 18 different start-ups are currently testing how applications can benefit from 5G. "Here they can gain their first live experience of how their applications behave in the 5G network," says Andreas Droste, Innovation Manager at T-Systems. "Based on the live data, the start-ups are developing the first prototypes for Industry 4.0, as well as the entertainment and gaming industries.” They include the Berlin-based start-up forwARdgame, which develops AR games for smartphones and tablets. "We want to offer gamers a completely new gaming experience," says Tim Friedland, CEO of forwARdgame. "We rely on the low latencies of the 5G network to merge virtual elements with the real environment.” The team of five is focused on outdoor activities and interaction with other players. The start-up is developing Active AR technologies so that users can actively interact with virtual objects in a mixed reality experience.

At this year's 5G Ecosystem Summit, visitors were able to experience for themselves the quality and fun factor of the AR games and promptly chose forwARdgame as one of the three winners. The start-up is now working with Deutsche Telekom to develop new business models for innovative industry solutions. As a winner of the 5G Summit, the Berlin-based company will benefit from further support in the T-Systems Innovation Center.

To see how 5G enables natural interaction in virtual training, read our next blog post about the start-up SenseGlove.