41 VR FOCUS E-tourism
IN 360 DEGREES
times. Mativision created a VR app for tourists visiting Bristol which overlaid video of recent events, such as Bristol Pride parade, on the squares and streets where they took place. These are works in progress, hampered by limitations in technology, as technical partner to the project InterDigital discovered. “The problem is one of scale,” says Dirk Trossen, InterDigital’s senior principle engineer. “The technology is not capable of delivering 360 streams in real time to more than 20 users in one location.” It is the high degree of synchronicity required to make video work in a group tour guide scenario which is problematic, at least until the next release of the 5G specifications between 2020 and 2023.
BIOMETRICS, AR/VR, MOBILE TECHNOLOGY AND MORE ARE SIMPLIFYING TRAVEL TODAY, AND FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGING TRAVEL IN THE FUTURE
MAKING HISTORY A REALITY A step up from this is location-based VR experiences which may eventually take over from human guided tours. Experiments in this area are predicated on the higher bandwidth and low latency capability of the 5G cellular network.
5G Smart Tourism, a government-funded project led by the West of England tourist board, demonstrated a number of applications this year. Among these were BBC R&D and Aardman Animation’s use of AR/VR to map the life of Bath from Roman to Victorian
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook