6G: Your passport to the immersive experience revolution
What if, as you stood among the ruins of ancient Rome, the stones beneath your feet began to glow and the city rebuilt itself around you? eXtended Reality (XR) encompasses technologies that merge the digital and physical worlds, enabling immersive experiences that blur the line between reality and the virtual realm. While 5G-Advanced has been designed to support XR applications, the growing ecosystem of smart glasses and headsets will demand even greater network capabilities, especially as more people take these immersive experiences outdoors. To fully realize this potential, 6G must deliver enhanced performance, supporting high download and upload data rates for real-time applications with stringent latency requirements, anytime, anywhere.
Smart glasses pivot
XR headsets such as the Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap achieve immersive mixed reality experiences for enterprise and creative use by combining onboard computing with advanced spatial mapping. These types of headsets require efficient rendering of complex 3D multimedia objects, either locally on the device or through edge cloud processing, to ensure smooth and realistic interactions.
In recent years, a new class of lightweight, stylish smart glasses has emerged. This evolution began with audio and camera glasses like Amazon Alexa Echo Frames and Meta Ray-Ban Stories Gen 1, offering basic functionalities such as video capture and voice assistance. By 2023, display-less AI glasses, exemplified by Meta Ray-Ban Stories Gen 2, introduced contextual large language model (LLM) capabilities, selling two million units. These glasses enable users to capture photos and videos, listen to audio, take calls, and interact hands-free with an AI assistant using voice commands. This year we also saw the debut of head-up display (HUD) smart glasses, including Meta Ray-Ban Display, Google Android XR Glasses, and Brilliant Labs’ Halo, which overlay text, images, and simple videos. Looking ahead, fully immersive 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) AR glasses, such as the Meta Orion prototype, promise wide-field-of-view color displays with spatially anchored 3D interactions, despite ongoing optical challenges. ABI Research forecasts 15 million shipments of no-display AI glasses alone by 2030 with a CAGR of nearly 68%.
Extended reality experiences
There is also a broad set of XR experiences that don’t require smart glasses. These services instead run on devices like smartphones, tablets or PCs. Consumer use cases comprise of garden furniture try-out, navigation, social media filters or location-based augmented reality mobile games such as Pokémon Go.
Nokia RXRM (Real-time eXtended Reality Multimedia) is a system for streaming low-latency 360° video with spatial 3D audio, enabling immersive real-time experiences such as remote supervision, situational awareness and teleoperation. When paired with Nokia’s 5G 360° camera, RXRM becomes a full end-to-end solution for immersive media in industrial, entertainment, defense and remote operations contexts.
Nokia also works with partners on network digital twins. This XR applications enable operators to utilize virtual replicas of real-world infrastructure to simulate, monitor, and optimize network performance in real time.
At Nokia, we’re pushing the boundaries of immersion with groundbreaking research into thermal haptics technology for XR that lets users feel temperature changes through touch. By tracking how heat moves through different materials, Nokia is pioneering conductivity-based thermal haptics that make digital experiences more lifelike than ever.
The new XR enablers in 6G
From a 3GPP standards perspective, the evolution of XR enablers accelerated with 5G-Advanced and is anticipated to advance further with 6G. Recent 5G-Advanced XR enablers include enhanced support for adaptive low-latency traffic, building on the Nokia-developed and award-winning Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable throughput (L4S) scheme, which boosts Quality of Experience (QoE) of variable rate services. Additionally, increased XR application awareness in the radio access network (RAN) along with other capacity-enhancing features boost overall XR capacity and QoE, e.g. by means of exploring the new PDU-set information. Terminal power-saving features for XR services have also been introduced to extend device battery life and make XR suitable for everyday use, a key factor for driving mass-market adoption.
With today’s typical 5G deployments, XR capacity is on the order of 6-10 simultaneous users per 100MHz carrier macro cell at 3.5GHz, when considering demanding users with 4K high-quality real-time video and 10-15ms bounded one-way latency for the RAN part.
These 5G-Advanced XR features are projected to largely be included also in 6G. At the same time 6G is poised to offer significant better XR performance and pave the way for the next generation of XR services and devices, as expressed in Nokia’s 6G Day One white paper. 6G will provide superior support for high data rate, real-time applications with bound latency constraints, wherever needed. This will be achieved through a novel design of the 6G RAN protocols, featuring more efficient parallel processing and enhanced support for step-wise introduction of new device types so as to support emerging XR use cases. Specifically, the development of innovative XR devices featuring various form factors and powered by AI-driven capabilities for seamless interaction between users and cyberspace necessitates a more adaptable approach to designing the RAN protocol stack, rather than relying on a rigid, monolithic framework. Moreover, an adaptive QoS scheme is anticipated, enabling the RAN to autonomously upgrade and downgrade QoS metrics within a given range, working in collaboration with applications to achieve a higher QoE. 6G’s AI-native capabilities will further enhance XR performance by learning XR traffic characteristics to autonomously adapt the network and serve it more efficiently on the radio interface. The modernized, lean, and AI-native 6G physical layer will also contribute to substantially increase performance for XR services.
Advancements through compute-network coordination will also be pursued for 6G. This involves a seamless integration between 6G systems, service exposure platforms, and cloud platforms to optimize server selection and dynamically offload compute services. By leveraging autonomous real-time network coordination and system status exposure, 6G will enable the deployment of distributed applications that require real-time interaction, such as XR and AI. As an example, 6G will natively support offloading computationally complex tasks such as XR split rendering to network edge servers without compromising device performance. Additionally, the proposed technology framework envisions the 6G core providing QoS, traffic steering, and network metrics, facilitating a more efficient and responsive network environment. This will be achieved through a collaborative ecosystem where application clients, servers, and DNS servers act as application functions, supported by a cloud operations manager and a service exposure and monetization platform. This coordination promises to unlock new compute services, enhancing user experiences and paving the way for innovative applications in the 6G era. The figure below depicts the key enablers to have the next generation of XR come true in 6G.
Using Nokia’s state-of-the-art dynamic system-level simulator, we have assessed 6G’s potential to support higher XR cell capacity. The simulator includes detailed modeling of the air interface, RAN protocols, and realistic representation of XR traffic in the form of real-time 4K video at 45Mbps with one-way latency bounds of 10-15ms, in line with 3GPP simulation guidelines. We studied a dense urban macro scenario, assuming MU-MIMO (Type-II precoding) with up to 64 CSI-RS ports for 3.5GHz deployments with 100MHz, and 256 CSI-RS for 7GHz with 200MHz. Additionally, we considered optimized Radio Resource Management (RRM), such as smart Code Block Group-based Hybrid ARQ and AI-powered dynamic scheduling. These studies revealed that 6G has the potential to support approximately 20 XR users per cell at 3.5GHz with 100MHz bandwidth, increasing to more than 50 XR users per cell for a deployment at 7GHz with 200MHz carrier bandwidth. These are very encouraging numbers to sustain the increase of XR traffic in 6G, indicating significant gains over what is possible with today’s 5G deployments. These are initial XR capacity estimates, which will, of course, be further refined as 6G standardization progresses, ensuring that all features included in 6G Radio are accurately reflected in our system-level simulator to produce highly relevant and realistic results.
The bright future of mobile XR
The future for new cutting-edge XR features looks bright for mobile users as 6G takes such technologies to the next level, enabling exciting new use cases that are not yet on our radar as of today. Collaborative efforts in standards along with strong ecosystems of network vendors, device manufacturers, service platforms, and creative application developers will unlock the full potential of XR. This will make immersive reality and experiences scalable, desirable, affordable and accessible to everyone from everywhere.
With 6G, AI and XR can become the user experience for the realities of tomorrow.
