KDDI, Deutsche Telekom, MobiledgeX, Sturfee and Mawari have jointly developed a mobile application proof of concept to demonstrate an augmented reality (AR) application leveraging remote rendering (Mawari) and visual positioning (Sturfee) running on a common platform (MobiledgeX) across edge networks jointly provided by KDDI and Deutsche Telekom.
This proof of concept (PoC) is expected to accelerate global edge-enabled extended reality (XR) application development and will be showcased in alignment with the GSMA Foundry Telco Edge Cloud (TEC) Pre-Commercial Trials initiative.
To provide the best user experience, next generation mobile applications like XR require close proximity to support APIs and SDKs in backend code, and deliver the quality of experience and scale that mobile application users demand. To address that requirement, there’s a growing need for consistent APIs and cloud services to be deployed within MNO edge networks to support these next generation applications in an easy and consistent way. For MNOs, the challenge is speed, scale and collaboration. Today, MNOs cannot benefit from each other's complementary market development, especially in the area of discovering new “in-network” services that will be required to power the next generation of apps and solutions.
This trial shows the ability to run advanced, edge-enabled services across different geographies and MNO edge networks. Using the MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud platform to provide unified access to KDDI and Deutsche Telekom’s 5G edge resources, Sturfee and Mawari were able to easily deploy and run services with optimal latency and bandwidth, creating a highly-differentiated mobile application experience.
In the Bloom City demo application, Mawari’s XR streaming solution delivers a real-time multiplayer experience featuring hyper-realistic, personalized digital assistants (developed in conjunction with "au VISION STUDIO”) that leads app users on a guided tour of Bonn, Germany or Tokyo, Japan. The digital tour guide and virtual, interactive billboard advertisements are overlaid atop the user’s real world view via Sturfee’s Visual Positioning Service (VPS), while KDDI and Deutsche Telekom-built servers running NVIDIA GPUs in edge networks provide performant compute access.
The MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud platform running on top of MNO edge infrastructure allows for the dynamic and optimized deployment of workloads that require location-based execution and reduced latency.
The Sturfee VPS also uses MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud to onboard backend services for satellite-imagery based high-precision localization systems, and allows deployment with just one API call to any target edge infrastructure connected to the system.
Mawari’s XR streaming format powered by datacenter GPUs allows the highest fidelity content to be streamed from the edge networks to XR devices, including smartphones and head-mounted displays that could otherwise not be processed by the devices. The result is unprecedented quality, saving cost, size and battery life, while supporting scalability.
A low latency connection to the edge network is required to correctly position and blend hyper-realistic content with the real world. The PoC makes full use of MNO edge networks to enhance ultra-low latency features of 5G, and is expected to realize a whole new platform distributing innovative XR services and experiences across the world.
