Huawei focus areas include connected drones, cloud VR, AR, wireless robotics and connected cars.
BARCELONA, Spain – Huawei unveiled details about the operation of its X Labs during a roundtable at the Mobile World Congress 2017. A number of companies including Intel, GE, Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, Toshiba, Philips Lighting, Noitom, Continental, DNP and CloudMinds participated in the Huawei event.
During the meeting, Huawei officials announced details on operations, including research directions, collaborative models and resource provision.
X Labs was officially launched in November 2016, and is designed to provide an open innovation platform to promote integrated collaboration across the industry ecosystem. The Chinese vendor said the platform serves as the gathering grounds for technology providers, vertical industry partners and service providers to jointly explore future mobile use case scenarios in video, household and vertical industry domains.
“In 2017, X Labs will focus on four major areas of research.” said Peter Zhou, chief marketing officer of Huawei Wireless Solutions. “Connected drones, cloud, [augmented reality], [virtual reality], wireless robotics and connected vehicles. This will be a close collaborative effort between partners around the world. Together, we will explore the unexplored, aiming to push the boundaries of wireless technology, develop new applications and, of course, unearth new market potential.”
Huawei said drones play an increasingly important role in a broad range of sectors, including logistics, plant protection and media. One of X Labs’ primary research directions will focus on using wireless networks to more effectively regulate the flights of unmanned aircraft and manage remote automated tasks.
The company also said it sees AR and VR being on the verge of commercialization. Service and content “cloudification” are an important part of this process, and mobile requirements will provide the perfect opening for carriers to get their foot in the door, Huawei added.
X Labs is also set to focus on the connectivity of connected car platforms, their ability to communicate with one another and their edge computing capabilities.
