Unless you've been on a deserted island (which honestly, might've been a good idea for the past year), you've no doubt heard of 5G. You might even have a 5G phone right now, there are a number of them on the market right now. 3G enabled the phones to start being more than a voice/text device, while 4G brought us the data opportunity that we've been living in for a few years now. Without 4G, much of what we do on our phones on a daily basis would not be possible, including watching content, maps, etc.
5G, as it becomes more widely available, will drive even more opportunities in our mobile/digital worlds. This report by Microsoft Cloud has some great stats for you to dive into! Some other 5G links:
- You can see the Verizon 5G keynote talk here.
- The CES 5G hub is here.
- Forbes Wrap-Up of 5G here.
- c|net panel on how 5G can help with Covid here.
- Location aware services/presence marketing. With the AR cloud and 5G, there will be really exciting opportunities. A few years back, I wrote about how Place & Information Will Change in an AR World to begin asking the questions about what happens when information is truly location aware.
Back in maybe 2012, I was out with a colleague looking for a place to eat. As frequently happens, you can easily get in a food rut, and we were looking for someplace new. We stood on a street corner going through Yelp, etc., looking for a restaurant that was actually across the street. Being able to place information onto the real world will become a very critical part of our futures. Think of the number of times you read an article on the best new restaurants in a certain town and how great it would be if that information could actually be overlayed onto that location the next time you visit. Or being able to see what your friends thought about a specific physical place while you were there.
But, bringing AR into our everyday lives brings up a number of critical questions:
- What's the UX for this new, AR world? Do we really want unfiltered and/or sponsored information overlaid on everything we look at? What's the new input experience for accessing this content? Will we use gestures, voice, eye movement? Take a look at what Alain Thys had to say about the future of UX and see what you think of his ideas.
- What is the backend for all of this content? Ori Inbar believes that it will be the AR Cloud that will drive the massive adoption needed to use AR as part of our every day lives. Information needs to be accessible in a very precise location for it to have value to the audience.
- Who will own this backend and be responsible for the massive amount of data that will need to flow through the system in order for it to be universally used? If I can only access data on one platform or another, that will make it hard for mass adoption to occur. I frequently say if TV had started like tech works today, and you needed a different TV set to watch each channel, there wouldn't have been a TV industry.
- Given how much of social media today has been taken over by trolls and haters, what happens to a society where that hate can live all around us, visually, in the real world? How will we clean up the AR graffiti that we know we cover the world? Who will make the distinction between art and garbage?
- How do we handle the right value exchange for the consumer in this connected, overlaid world? They know when the work we're doing is really only of benefit to us and they don't like it. We will not be able to force them to opt-in to this AR world unless they have a good reason.
- Entertainment. Sony showed off an awesome concert featuring Madison Beer during their keynote and it took me a couple of looks before I realized it was all CGI. With 5G, this kind of virtual experience will be available more widely. In fact, consumers will spend even more time on mobile devices to find the entertainment when and where they want thanks to 5G.
In addition, new forms of entertainment will be unlocked thanks to 5G. A number of years back during the Tribeca Film Festival, there was a demo of a new type of entertainment, where you had to walk around Tribeca to watch specific scenes in the places where they were actually filmed (I tried to find a link to it, but couldn't). The idea that you could walk around a city and have to visit different physical locations to experience a movie would be pretty cool.
A few years back, Sydney & I were at EPCOT Center and experienced the Kim Possible Adventure in the World Showcase. This scavenger brought Kim Possible to life and we traveled through the various countries that made up the World Showcase. Sydney & I had a great time and we saw a lot more of EPCOT than we might have otherwise.
- Sports and eSports. The in-stadium experience was being transformed before and Covid will speed that transformation along in sports like it has in every other field. From fan engagement to athlete training, 5G can impact almost all aspects of the sports experience. The NFL is testing 5G in stadiums, bringing player stats to the fan faster and in more detail than they can with existing infrastructure. Using technologies like AR, the field could come alive with all kinds of information. Inc. wrote about the use of 5G here and we're just at the beginning of where this tech can take us. You can als
VentureBeat gives some great examples here to show how the in-stadium experience will change with the addition of 5G. For example, the Sacramento Kings have built an entire virtual venue for guests to explore and see what their seats will look like. Speaking with ZDnet, Verizon VP of Network Engineering Brian Mecum said:
"We set up this 360-degree camera on the scores table, and what it allowed us to do was have the kids see the game as if they were sitting in a rare spot, and be able to put on the VR goggles ... they would be able to watch the game courtside."
From bringing the stadium experience to your home to enhancing the in-stadium experience, 5G will impact all parts of the sports experience. And this is simply building on what we already know to do. I have no doubt that we'll create immersive experiences that haven't even been considered yet as 5G is rolled out everywhere.