How 5G will change our approach to shopping and social networking

In previous articles, we talked about what 5G is and why mmWave technology is so important for its development. Now we turn to the description of specific capabilities that users will have with the advent of the 5G era, and talk about how the simple processes we are used to may change in the near future. One of these processes is social interaction and online shopping. 4G networks gave us streaming, and with them mobile devices got completely new functions, but now it's time for artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR) - these technologies use 5G networks to take another step into the future.

The evolution of social networking interactions

Already, we can take a smartphone or tablet, view reviews of other visitors about cafes and restaurants nearby and choose where we will have dinner. If you turn on location, we will be able to see the distance to each of the points, sort the places by popularity or distance, and then open the application with the map to make a convenient route. In the era of 5G, everything will become much easier. It will be enough just to raise the smartphone with 5G support to the eye level and “scan” your surroundings. All nearest restaurants will be marked on the screen along with information about the menu, ratings and reviews of visitors, and convenient signs will prompt the shortest way to any of them.

How is this possible? In fact, your smartphone at this moment shoots video in high resolution and sends it to the "cloud" for analysis. High resolution in this case is important for the accuracy of the identification of objects, but it creates a greater load on the network due to the volume of information transmitted. More precisely, it would create, if not for the speed of data transmission and the huge bandwidth of 5G networks.
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The second “ingredient” due to which such technology can exist is a low delay. With the proliferation of 5G networks, users will notice that similar clues on their smartphone screens will appear faster and faster, almost instantly. When the captured video is uploaded to the “cloud”, the image recognition system with 5G support is already starting to select among those seen buildings that correspond to the user's request, that is, restaurants with high ratings. After processing the data, these results will be sent back to the smartphone, where the augmented reality subsystem will superimpose them on the image received from the camera and display them in the appropriate places on the screen. And it is precisely for this that the minimum delay is important.

Another good example is the use of 5G to create shared “stories” and work with content. Now, for example, shooting video and uploading these files to social networks are two separate tasks. If you are at a family party, birthday or wedding, each of the guests himself uploads photos and video clips from the event on the pages on Facebook or Instagram, and there are no “common” functions like the ability to simultaneously apply filters to a frame you like or edit video together. And after the holiday you will be able to find all the taken pictures and videos only if each of the participants laid them out with some kind of unique and common tag for everyone. And still they will be scattered through the pages of your friends and relatives, and not collected in one general album.

With the 5G technology, you can easily combine photos and video files of your loved ones into a single project and work on it together, and the project participants will immediately upload their files and process them in real time! Imagine that you left for the weekend out of town, and each participant of the trip has instant access to all the pictures and clips that you will have time to make during the trip.

To implement such a project, several factors are needed at once: a very high data transfer rate, low latency and high network bandwidth! High resolution video transmission loads the network heavily, but with 5G it will occur almost instantly. Real-time file processing can be a slow and complicated process if several people work on it at once. But the speed and throughput of the 5G networks here will help to remove the delay and hangs that would appear when cropping photos or applying new filters. In addition, the AI ​​can help with your projects. For example, your device with 5G technology will automatically identify your friends and relatives in snapshots or videos and invite them to process these files together.

The evolution of online shopping

Finding and buying a new sofa is not an easy task. Before you go to the furniture store (or to the site), you need to decide on the place where the sofa will stand in the room, measure the free space, think about how it will be combined with the rest of the situation ...

5G technology will help simplify this process. Thanks to the 5G-smartphone, you will no longer need roulette and ask if the sofa in the store fits in with the coffee table and the color of the carpet. It is enough to load the dimensions of the sofa and its characteristics from the official website of the manufacturer, and a three-dimensional model of the sofa will appear on the smartphone screen, which you can “place” in the room yourself and immediately see if this particular model is right for you.

How is this possible? The camera of your 5G-smartphone in this case will help the AI ​​measure the parameters of the room to determine if there is enough space for a new sofa. Rajan Patel, CTO of Google Augmented Reality, used the Google Lens application at the 2018 Snapdragon Tech Summit summit for this very purpose. At the same time, he demonstrated how important the data transfer rate of 5G networks is for fast loading of the model and textures of furniture. And after downloading, the technologies of augmented reality allow you to place a “virtual” sofa in a place selected by the user, and its dimensions will be 100% the same as indicated on the site. And the user will only have to decide for himself whether to proceed to the next step - the purchase.

We believe that the 5G era will improve and complement communication, online shopping and other aspects of our life, and routine tasks (even those that we don’t suspect yet) will become easier and more enjoyable.