5G football?
A collaboration between Nokia and BT has brought live VR (Virtual Reality) broadcasting over 5G. The technology's promise of significantly higher bandwidth levels, less lag, and reduced latency presents us with incredible new possibilities, including fully immersive sport and entertainment - both live and recorded.
The VIP Treatment
In February, Nokia and BT joined forces in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress to show how high quality footage on VR headsets is possible through the use of 5G technology. For those who attended the event, the UEFA cup match between CSK Moscow and Tottenham Hotspur was shown live through VR. VR participants were able to view the entire game from the perspective of someone in the VIP box, which allowed them to experience a unique and immersive viewpoint of not only the game but also of the exclusive venue itself.
The game was captured on Nokia's OZO camera, which boasts 8 2K-by-2K high definition camera lenses to capture the premium quality 360 footage. The OZO is also the first of its kind to enable real time monitoring of virtual reality footage.
5G Integration.
With the OZO camera the capture and monitoring of the VR feed is easy, but then you would have to broadcast the footage live to VR headsets all over the country. This is where 5G comes into place, hoping that it will live up to its promise, 5G should be able to handle it.
Nokia's 5G FIRST, which includes Nokia Air Scale Massive MIMO adaptive antennas and Cloud-RAN implementations based around Nokia AirFrame, is what BT were able to rely on to transmit the live feed of the game over the super fast 5G connections.
Having recently acquired the UK's largest mobile operator, EE, late last year 5G could become a wide spread feature across many phones, and with the addition of Samsung and Google's VR devices, and Nokia's 5G technology and VR cameras, live VR video feeds could become more popular than first anticipated.
CEO of BT Technology, Howard Watson, said “5G and VR are both technologies with enormous potential. This exciting joint research with Nokia is allowing us to explore how they can work together to provide a transformative experience for our customers in the future. Drawing on the high bandwidths and low latencies of 5G will allow us to go beyond the already compelling VR experiences that are possible over 4G, and cater for more interactive future VR content which will place people right at the heart of the action.”
Created by Sam Gaunt 2017
