The Caped Crusader has sold out. While the full benefits of next-generation wireless – 5G won’t be realized until at least mid-2020, Batman is being used to pimp 5G. AT&T used The guardian of Gotham to create demand for mixed-reality at last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain. The mixed-reality experience featured DC Comics Batman and the Scarecrow battling it out on the MWC show floor.
Fierce Video
reports that AT&T (T), Ericsson (ERIC), Intel (INTC), and Warner Bros., with DC, are using 5G technology and edge computing to build a location-based mixed-reality experience. For the walk-in experience at MWC, visitors put on an augmented reality headset. There they witnessed a 2 to 3-minute experience.
Ade Kushimo, director of business development, IoT, and emerging business at Ericsson told Fierce Video, “The really cool part of the experience is going to be the fact that you have this virtual, digital content being embedded into your physical space. That gives you that mixed reality experience.”
Mixed reality experience with Batman
Doug Matheson, vice president of strategic business development at Ericsson, said the proof-of-concept experience demonstrated that 5G technology (both radio and core) could be combined with intellectual property to create a mixed reality experience that’s both mobile and untethered.
In order to create a good mixed-reality experience, image lag has to be kept to a minimum. Image lag will make you dizzy and ruin the experience. That means that compute power has to be pushed out to the edge of the network to reside closer to the end-user. The compute power needed to process a mixed reality experience can’t live in a centralized data center somewhere.
The cloud and edge network architecture allows for heavy computing to be done away from the device. So, the goal is to shift processing to the cloud and transport it there using a 5G network. The Batman demo ran on a fully integrated 5G network using Ericsson radio base stations 5G network technology will help supply the lower latency and higher speeds and enabled by Intel Xeon processors and the Intel 5G mobile trial platform.
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Mobile Marketer says that 5G will have a huge impact on AT&T’s mobile network. Its data traffic has grown more than 470,000% since 2007, with video making up half of the mobile data. Video may expand its share of data traffic to more than 75% by 2022, according to the company’s estimates.
Batman now works for AT&T following its acquisition of Time Warner who owned Warner Brothers, which owned DC Comics, the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Oswald Cobblepot, and the Flash.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.