94 CREATING UNCOMPROMISED
Congratulations on winning the Technical Paper Award. Can you tell me a bit about the research and the issues it was aiming to address? So our project, 5G Edge-XR, was all about trying to bring together 5G and cloud GPU compute and understand how we could enable next-generation extended reality experiences. We fundamentally wanted to more fully understand the benefits and challenges around pairing together 5G and cloud GPU to deliver better XR experiences to the hands of viewers that might be normally achieved just by using the clients themselves – tablets, phones, VR headsets. The goal was really trying to democratise access to XR experiences by trying to reduce the need for heavy processing on end client devices.
The paper seems to be very much a team effort. Tell me about how this came about and how you were able to draw these different skill sets together. The actual project was brought together by a project call from the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which was focused on 5G testbeds and trials. So we brought together a collaboration between a group of quite small companies, together with ourselves, each focused on bringing a unique element to the party. We had BT Applied Research together with BT Sport driving the production and the delivery side; we had Salsa Sound, who brought expertise alongside ours in spatial audio; we had Condense, who brought a great capability around volumetric video that we used in two use cases within the project. The Grid Factory has expertise in cloud compute, so we use them to develop and deploy and manage our GPU cluster. We also had Dance East on the project, they wanted to explore how dance education could actually be using these new types of technology; and the University of Bristol, which worked quite heavily with Condense to look at different ways that we could in the future optimise the contribution and the encoding of contribution of volumetric video. Beyond that core team, we had other people as well, including Dorna and MotoGP, Frank Warren boxing, Sportall – who we worked with around stadium use cases – Nvidia, Nreal and Strathclyde University.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES Jo Ruddock speaks to Andrew Gower, Head of Immersive & Interactive Content Research at BT Applied Research, about his work on the Best Technical Paper Award winning research project 5G Edge-XR
Andrew Gower, BT Applied Research
“It was very important in order to try and work out the techno-economic model that we didn’t just focus on one particular domain”
What’s next for the team following the release of the paper? In the shorter term, many of the partners are continuing to work together, so we’re still working with Condense and Salsa Sound exploring how volumetric video together with 5G and edge cloud compute could be used in boxing and other types of stadium-based sports. We’re further exploring the techno- economic model, about how cloud GPU can more effectively be deployed at a particular price point that enables it to be used by not only enterprise but in the consumer domain as well. We’re also trying to explore, as are the other project partners, how we can take the learnings from this project and downstream it and use it in other domains in the future. This includes things like the metaverse, so how what we’ve done here can actually lead on to Web3 and a completely new way for sports fans to consume content and get value from it.
What role do you think 5G will play in how sport is delivered and consumed in the future?
BT Sport and ourselves have been exploring how 5G can be used not only in contribution, but also in delivery as well. And it’s the delivery aspect we were specifically looking at within the proect. So, for us, the key elements of 5G being super high speed, amazing low latency, high capacity in some of the use cases as well – the need for actually delivering good quality connectivity in locations where there are tens of thousands of people – and also multi-axis edge compute, which was really important linking that into 5G. Fundamentally, those together help us deliver new immersive and interactive experiences through devices like Nreal AR headsets. And this is one of the things we were looking at as an alternative way to deliver these types of experiences to consumers, delivering directly onto the devices over a 5G network.
How does it feel to win the Best Technical Paper Award? It’s a real thrill. It’s such an honour to be recognised by the IBC Technical Committee for the great work that we and the rest of the partners did on the project. It’s very humbling.
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