Augmented reality has the ability to compile tons of data from digital devices and transform it into experiences people can view and interact with in the physical world. So far, the method has helped brands deepen experiences for sports fans, bring dance challenges to life and allow shoppers to try on makeup with their phones.

Already broad, the applications for AR are quickly expanding. At MWC Barcelona’s panel entitled “Blurred Lines: Augmented Reality in Everyday Life,” leaders from Avegant, Holo-Light, VMware and more discussed how AR can be used to improve safety, increase efficiency and deliver real business results.

Right now, most AR uses cases that operate via a network have to be done in a certain place and require a huge network infrastructure. Virtual reality and AR startup Holo-Light is working on overcoming this to increase the tech’s mobility and performance so that AR can be used anywhere, according to Holo-Light GmbH head of technology Philipp Landgraf. 

In December, Holo-Light announced it was building XRnow, the first immersive streaming platform designed for mass adoption of AR and VR applications on mobile devices. Like Netflix for AR and VR, the platform utilizes the power of the cloud to enable high-performance processing, on-demand access and global availability of AR and VR experiences.

The platform will allow companies to scale AR and VR use cases and showcase services and products in new ways. The example Landgraf gave is selling a car. Auto companies won’t always have all their models available in inventory but as AR becomes more developed, ray tracing—an intuitive image generation method—and algorithms can be used to create photo-realistic films showcasing a breadth of car models.

BMW already leverages Holo-Light’s AR engineering software 3S Pro to speed up design processes—from individual vehicle sections through complex production stages—by as much as 12 months. The regular computing power of mobile AR devices wouldn’t be able to power this use case because the individual parts of a car are detailed, complex and large in file size. But with the integration of Holo-Light’s in-house products AR3S and ISAR SDK (Interactive Streaming for Augmented Reality), BMW can visualize its 3D CAD (computer-aided design) models in very high quality and without any data preparation.

British telecom company BT has also has been participating in a few mixed reality projects lately, according to the company’s principal manager of mobile and 5G research team, Maria Cuevos. In February, it helped debut The Green Planet AR Experience, created by Factory 42 with BBC Studios. Upon entry, guests are given a mobile phone that helps immersive them in six plant worlds powered by BT’s mobile network EE 5G. David Attenborough, who’s in 3D hologram form, guides them through the journey.

“The biggest learning for us is to put [AR] in the hands of the people and see how they use it and how they experience the whole thing,” said Cuevos.

Just like smartphones and watches, AR devices will go through several iterations. Chief executive and founder Edward Tang’s startup Avegant creates display engines, or tiny projectors, for AR glasses that will power the next generation of these consumer glasses, he said. 

To increase consumer adoption of AR wearables, Tang emphasized the importance of sizing down AR glasses and getting them to feel exactly like everyday eyewear. Avegant’s current projector, he added, is smaller than the width of a pencil which enables the company to produce stylish and functional glasses while adding intelligence into the displays.

“The interest level and investments that we’re seeing from all the major consumer players is an order of magnitude above what we’ve seen even just a couple [of] years ago. We’re seeing a lot more momentum and the technologies are getting to a point where we can really check a lot of the boxes it’s going to take to make successful consumer products,” said Tang.

He believes the work being done with Meta Oculus, Android’s ARCore and iOS’ ARKit development kits, as well as the sensor tech being used in smartphones, are all a precursor for what’s to come on wearable type devices.

Looking ahead, Tang said it’s important industry players don’t try cramming a phone or computer experience into a pair of AR glasses. Instead, they should consider the uses cases for the glasses’ sensors and contextual information. Some of the uses he envisions for AR glasses include drawing a line on the ground while giving someone directions, leaving a restaurant review while looking at the restaurant and the glasses knowing its wearer wants to buy a product just by looking at it. 

From VMware, product line marketing manager Jessie Stoks said the biggest application for VR head-mounted wearables the company is seeing is for front-line workers including shift-based and service workers. Headsets deliver content hands-free in real-time to the worker, which is especially helpful for those in hazardous environments where quick access to a mobile device isn’t feasible, she said.

AR and VR headsets are also providing uninterrupted concentration to assembly line workers who may have a workstation but experience a lot of back and forth between the computer and whatever they’re working on. The result is greater productivity and less room for error, noted Stoks. These headsets are also streamlining remote training and collaboration as it’s easier to have the same view as the worker rather than guide them through emails or fly them out for training.

Despite the progress made in mobile connectivity, the pandemic widened the digital divide between the haves and have-nots. Today 450 million people, or 6 percent of the world’s population, don’t have a way of connecting to a mobile device, an issue commonly referred to as the coverage gap. And about 3 billion people do have access to mobile broadband networks yet still aren’t connected, a phenomenon known as the usage gap. Closing this usage gap will be key to achieving digital inclusion. 

During a panel on day one of MWC Barcelona, leaders from UNDP, Orange, GMSA and EY explored the current state of digital inclusion and why C-suite buy-in, the development of standard industry metrics and a multi-stakeholder approach are all needed to bridge the digital divide and accelerate the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as established by the United National General Assembly in 2015.

The mobile industry has long been recognized as a key enabler of social and economic improvement. Network coverage globally was expanded to more than a billion additional people between 2015 and 2019, as noted by the panel’s moderator Adrian Baschnonga, lead analyst for global telecommunications at EY. In addition, the mobile industry has achieved half of its potential contribution across 17 SDGs, up from 33 percent in 2015.

Yet connectivity and the availability of infrastructure alone don’t guarantee device and service affordability, digital literacy and technology skills, all of which can help increase levels of digital inclusion. With so many basic services necessary for everyday living available online like public transformation, health and education, it’s becoming as vital to be digitally literate as it is to know how to read and write, according to Antoine de Clerck, Orange societal responsibility animation director of CSR.

“Promoting more digital is simply a question of sustainability. We cannot be sustainable in the long term if half of the world’s population is excluded from using these basic services. It’s in our core business to make sure we operate in an inclusive way,” said de Clerck.

In Europe, a 24 percent usage gap exists, which means people who are connected and who might even use a smartphone still aren’t using digital services such as looking for a job online or buying a train ticket online, said de Clerck.

One way Orange is bringing affordable devices and skills to people is through the opening of digital centers in every country in which it operates. De Clerck notes that many of its employees volunteer at these centers to provide skills to vulnerable people which provides a lot of value to Orange employees.

At the start of the pandemic, about 3.7 billion people, or 45 percent of the global population, were unconnected in the world, ITU data shows. In the last couple of years, that figure dropped by another 800 million people. While that signals progress, 2.9 billion people, or a third of the world’s population, remain without access to the internet. Reasons for this include a lack of broadband coverage or other barriers such as a lack of awareness of the internet and its benefits, lack of perceived relevance and safety and security concerns.

Robert Opp, UNDP chief digital officer, said he and his team have started to think beyond matters of connectivity and infrastructure to look at the digital divide in a more holistic way.

“If we’re going to achieve the SDGs and get back on track to the SDGs—because they all took a hit as a result of COVID—we’re going to need to bridge the digital divide. It needs to be a holistic, multi-sectorial approach. It needs to be one that has people at the center,” Opp said.

During the course of just one year, UNDP assisted 82 countries to adopt over 580 digital solutions in response to the pandemic. Recently it released a new, three-pronged digital strategy that aims to help countries reap the benefits of digital technology.

As GSMA has observed, environmental, social and governance (ESG) is becoming a criterion at the heart of decision-making for investors, said Alix Jagueneau, GSMA head of external affairs and industry purpose.

“I don’t think the investor communities fully understand what’s critical to this industry, so there’s probably a lot of education and awareness-raising to be done . . . Metrics are only a means to an end, it’s not just for reporting purposes. The more we can start talking about that and engage in those discussions, the more it’s going to lead to a change,” said Jagueneau.

The World Economic Forum’s call for companies to disclose metrics beyond financial performance in its book Stakeholder Capitalism offers the mobile industry guidance on how to begin implementing its own measurement tools.  

Jagueneau added that GSMA has started to work with a group of operators with a focus on three areas: digital inclusion, e-waste to decarbonize the industry and digital human rights to ensure privacy, freedom of expression and child online safety.

What digital inclusion still lacks are standardized metrics. Opp said UNDP has started collecting best practices and examples of what is and isn’t working around how businesses can put SDG-related impact at the core of their strategy in ESG.

De Clerck echoed that sentiment, noting that the usage gap can’t be addressed by a single company. In the same way companies have used climate change as a north star metric, he calls on mobile operators to unify their work to create a standard metric for measuring digital inclusion.

In addition to engaging resources to quantify digital inclusion efforts, getting buy-in from the C-suite to make ESG a core business strategy will be critical for maximizing the social and economic impact of mobile connectivity, said Jagueneau.

Meta (formerly Facebook) has invested billions in connectivity worldwide over the last decade and recently announced that its subsea cable investments in Europe and APAC could potentially contribute to over half a trillion USD in additional gross domestic product by 2025.

Now the company is tackling the connectivity challenges in reimagining network infrastructure to support the metaverse, Meta vice president Dan Rabinovitsj said in a blog. Delivering virtual experiences in the metaverse will require innovations in fields like hybrid local and remote real-time rendering, video compression, edge computing, cross-layer visibility, spectrum advocacy, network optimizations, improved latency between devices and within radio access networks (RANs) and more.

Meta plans to build several prototypes of the metaverse to fully understand how to blend virtual content with people’s physical worlds. In the meantime, it’s looking for collaborators to help fully realize its metaverse vision. Rabinovitsj writes:

“Over the next decade, we hope the metaverse will reach a billion people around the world, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support millions of jobs for creators and developers. This opportunity calls for vast enhancements in capacity and fundamental shifts in how networks are architected and deployed, as well as industry-wide collaboration—from tech companies to mobile operators, service providers, policymakers, and more—to prepare for the metaverse.”

First up, Rabinovitsj explains how Meta has to reduce latency so that complex graphical scenes in the metaverse don’t take hours to download over current networks. To meet the tight latency constraints, the company sees remote rendering over edge cloud, or some form of hybrid between local and remote rendering, playing a greater role in the near future.

 “Enabling remote rendering will require both fixed and mobile networks to be rearchitected to create compute resources at a continuum of distances to end-users,” said Rabinovitsj.

Another challenge that lies ahead is providing consistent quality immersive experiences. A head-mounted display sitting close to the eyes will require retina-grade resolutions of much larger magnitude than a standard smartphone screen. To solve this issue, innovations across the hardware and software stack “as well as revolutionary improvements in network throughput,” will be needed, according to Rabinovitsj.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona, Meta said it plans to collaborate with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and partners to define the performance requirements for delivering great end-user experiences in the metaverse.

Meta is working with Telefónica to create a Metaverse Innovation Hub in Madrid where local startups and developers can access a “groundbreaking 5G laboratory.” There they’ll be able to utilize a metaverse end-to-end testbed on Meta and Telefónica’s network infrastructure and equipment, plus benefit from Telefónica’s open innovation ecosystem and Meta’s engineering resources.

Also at MWC, HTC chairwoman Cher Wang unveiled what a day in the life of the company’s metaverse world Viveverse—which will utilize HTC’s Vive virtual reality (VR) headsets—would look like. Viveverse, she said, would be a safe and secure space where kids and adults alike could customize, collaborate and have fun doing things like work out at the gym and go to virtual concerts.

In addition, HTC Vive debuted Vive Guardian, a new privacy and safety feature that lets parents limit access to apps and purchases while in-headset.