5G helps bring 3D holograms to life

5G is about to empower a shift from 2D to 3D communication thanks to its massive bandwidth and superfast speeds. Imagine a virtual fitting room where you can try on an outfit, send your friends your 3D hologram and solicit feedback in near real-time.

At Verizon's 5G Lab in New York City, Evercoast, a computer vision and 3D sensing software company, recently showed off how 5G and volumetric video capture can turn real people into lifelike, moving 3D holograms in just minutes.

Surrounded by a ring of about two dozen depth-sensing cameras, a person was captured then rendered into a full-motion 3D model. The image could then be viewed using a mobile device, volumetric display or AR/VR goggles. 

"Processing and streaming 3D volumetric video files requires a huge amount of bandwidth," said Evercoast CEO, Ben Nunez. "Normally, it would take a farm of in-house servers to process this content and hours or days to render, now it takes minutes."

Existing technology constraints have limited mass video communication to 2D content, but 5G is about to enable an entirely new means of communication and content creation. Aside from the dressing room of the future, this type of holographic communication can be used in corporate training, entertainment, medicine, emergency first response, and security. Consider a doctor viewing a hologram of a patient before they arrive on the operating table or envision the world of esports where instead of sitting at a computer, a player can be on an omni-directional treadmill and have their image captured in real time and streamed into the game. 

This is just the beginning for 5G and Verizon and companies like Evercoast that are leading the way – developing the 5G-enabled applications that will fundamentally change how we live, work and play.

Stay tuned next week for another cool 5G use case from Verizon's 5G Lab!

About the author(s):

Chris Ashraf is an external communications manager at Verizon writing about 5G and network solutions.

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