Spatial computing enables the blending of digital and physical environment
Last week, the 17th Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) was held at the University of Texas Austin’s Engineering Education and Research Center, highlighting the advances and opportunities at the intersection of human-centered computing, sensing and connectivity.
As Edison Thomaz, assistant professor at UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and one of the co-chairs of this year’s TWS, told RCR Wireless News prior to the event, wearable computing was a central focus at this year’s summit, as experts see this technology as “being one of the primary thrusts in terms of research and technology and usability” in the future.
To contribute to this theme, Michael Klug, VP of Advanced Photonics at Magic Leap took the stage to discuss the company’s headset, a wearable spatial computing device.
He explained that unlike augmented reality, which simply lays digital content on top of the physical world, spatial computing allows digital content to be persistent and to interact with the physical world. In other words, spatial computing enables the blending of digital and physical environment.
“Spatial commuting is an evolution and fusion of mobile devices and mobile technologies and people and computers into one wearable solution in our future,” Klug continued. “And that solution of course is heavily leveraging wireless technologies including 5G and a lot of cloud-based services.”
Because 5G is the biggest thing in wireless technology, it is important to understand how the next-generation of connectivity is going to fit into this emerging space of human-machine computing.
John Smee, VP of engineering and 5G R&D lead at Qualcomm, addressed this issue, explain where 5G is going next. “It is interesting how fast 5G commercialization happened,” he commented. “The reality is, that even much faster than 4G, 5G rollouts are already happening. We see that both in the sub 7 GHz bands and the mmWave bands.”
He went on to say that the smartphone business is going to change rapidly as we move towards a new understanding of mobility and connectivity. “There is this huge explosion of opportunity beyond just the mobile smartphone,” he said. “And so we can look at […] how is 5G moving into augmented reality, how is it moving into factories.”
Also critical to the future of mobile and wearable technologies is the wireless network’s ability to achieve reliable and wide coverage. “You look into the coverage capacity, and when multiple antennas are working together […] we are putting these antennas sites closer together because we are trying to drive this high level of reliability and at the same time, we’re trying to make this high-capacity, high-coverage combination,” Smee said.
He then drove home the point that 5G stands to drastically advance computing technologies: “Augmented reality is a great example where it brings together not only the compute side, but the communication side. Where will augmented reality be in five years and how much of that will leverage the underpinnings of 5G?”
