Faster Wireless Leads to New Affordances
Watching hockey after the Spatial Computing storm hits will never be the same. John Bollen, https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbollen/, seems to have a different Prime Directive. Not one of catching fish, but one of catching fans.
He is putting the finishing touches on the 5G infrastructure inside Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena and has built hotel infrastructure for a few of Vegas' most modern hotels. If you check into a room at the Aria resort, you will see his work when you turn on the IoT-run lights in your room, but now he has a bigger project: to augment an entire stadium. He told us of 5G's advantages: more than a gigabit per second of bandwidth, which is about 200xLTE ("Long-Term Evolution" wireless broadband communication for mobile devices) with very little relative latency, about two milliseconds from your phone to an antenna, and that a stadium full of people holding phones or wearing glasses will be able to use to connect. That is what many of the first users of 5G are experiencing. The theoretical limits are far higher. If you've been in a packed stadium and weren't able to even send a text, you'll know what a big deal that is.
He is excited by this last advantage of 5G: that visitors to the stadium he's outfitting with 5G antennas will be able to all use their devices at the same time.
T-Mobile and other mobile carriers want to use Las Vegas to show off the advantages of using 5G. They have hired him and his team to hang those antennas and lace fiber optic cables above the hallways in the stadium. He dreams of a world where hockey fans will use Spatial Computing to see hockey in a whole new way: one where you can see the stats streaming off of your favorite player skating across the rink.
He also sees the cost advantages of augmenting concerts. To make the fan experience amazing, the teams he's working with often have to hang huge expensive screens. He dreams of a day when he can deliver virtual screens all over the concert venue without renting as many expensive, large, and heavy screens and paying crews to hang them in different configurations. That dream will take most of the 2020s to realize because he has to wait for enough fans to wear glasses to make that possible, but his short-term plans are no less ambitious.
Photo credit: Robert Scoble. John Bollen, left, gives a tour of the 5G infrastructure at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena to healthcare executives.
Soon, you will hold your phone in the air to see Augmented Reality holograms dance and perform along with the real performers on stage. Or, maybe they won't be real at all. In China, thousands of people have already attended concerts of holograms that were computer generated, singing and dancing and entertaining stadiums. He knows humans are changing their ideas of what entertainment itself is, and he and his new stadium are ready. There are new stories to be made. New stories that will put us in the game, or on stage at a concert.
What really is going on here is that soon, everyone in the stadium will be streaming data up to massive new clouds, particularly hockey players, who will be captured by new cameras that capture the game in volumetric detail, and the players will be wearing sensor packages that show coaches and fans all sorts in terms of biometric data, such as their current speed, and more. This Spatial Computing data will change not just hockey games, but will change how we run our businesses, how we shop for new things, and the games we play with each other.