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Exclusive: AT&T will prove the potential of 5G at DreamHack’s CS:GO tournament
AT&T will be at the DreamHack Open to show what a 5G network can do by streaming footage of the CS:GO tournament live. Three 5G-enabled smartphones will be on hand to capture unique perspectives.
AT&T and Magic Leap Partnership is All About 5G, While Selling a $2,300 Headset Without It
AT&T and Magic Leap formed a partnership last year which looked a lot like the one between Cingular (now merged with AT&T) and Apple which led to the launch of iPhone. The idea was that the iPhone was an all new mobile computing device that needed a next-gen network which only Cingular could provide; the iPhone first launched exclusive to the Cingular network. AT&T and Magic Leap are pitching a similar marketing message involving Magic Leap One and 5G, and have begun exclusively selling the headset in select AT&T stores… but the whole thing falls flat upon the realization that the headset doesn’t actually have any 5G hardware.
Magic Leap’s marketing for its first AR headset, the Magic Leap One ‘Creator Edition’, has been… curious, to say the least. From the presentation on the company’s website, to a consumer-facing augmented reality Game of Thrones demo, to the availability of the headset in select AT&T and stores… it very much seems like the company is saying that this device is ready for a broader audience than just developers. But there’s little to justify the headset’s $2,300 price tag if you aren’t expecting to build applications for the headset that may one day make you money years in the future when such devices are more widespread.
This unclear messaging about who the headset is really for has reached a new peak of strangeness when AT&T and Magic Leap announced recently that the Magic Leap One is being exclusively sold in a handful of flagship AT&T stores.
“Beginning next week, AT&T and Magic Leap will take the leap to a new reality, further enhancing the way consumers experience their world [my emphasis],” reads a press release marking the occasion. The release is also filled with quotes from both companies about how critical a 5G network will be to building the future of computing that Magic Leap is promising:
“Our journey with Magic Leap to transform industry and consumer experiences starts today with the launch of the Magic Leap One only available from AT&T,” said John Donovan, CEO, AT&T Communications. “Together with Magic Leap, we’re making the future of education, telemedicine, sports, entertainment and everyday experiences extraordinary. But there’s so much more creativity ahead. 5G will help drive the next generation of spatial computing that will deliver immersive, interactive content everywhere.”
“AT&T’s investment in 5G will enable the widespread adoption of emerging and innovative technologies like Magic Leap’s spatial computing and will help to redefine how we access and experience everything from work, play, communication, media, healthcare and education,” said Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap. “The Magic Leap team and I are excited to take this next step in our exclusive partnership, tapping into AT&T’s vast retail distribution and the Magicverse innovations that will be powered by their game changing 5G network.”
The central message is clear: 5G is the key to realizing Magic Leap’s vision—one where spatial computing is part of our everyday lives. But the headset that’s now being sold in some AT&T stores doesn’t actually have any 5G hardware at all, which really convolutes the story the companies are spinning.
The press release does specify that the headset is Wi-Fi only, but in a way that doesn’t at all address the fact that it simultaneously talks about how important 5G is to the future the device is supposed to enable: “The initial launch will operate over a Wi-Fi connection and provide new communication and entertainment experiences at a whole new level.”
Magic Leap didn’t respond to our request for comment on the nature of their 5G messaging and partnership with AT&T.
Ostensibly, AT&T wants people who come into their stores to buy the $2,300 Magic Leap One. But at the same time they’re saying ‘for the real future that we’re promising, you’re going to need to buy another headset that’s equipped with 5G’.
It would have been as if Cingular and Apple talked about how the iPhone was the future of mobile computing, and then launched it exclusively in Cingular stores as a Wi-Fi only product… expecting customers that believed in the vision to later buy another iPhone which actually had cellular connectivity.
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This is just another oddity in a string of unclear messaging from Magic Leap’s marketing approach, which from an aesthetic standpoint, looks and feels targeted at consumers, but from a pricing and feature standpoint can’t be considered anything but a development kit.
Magic Leap is no clearer on messaging with developers who are actually understand that the product is a dev kit through and through. One developer I spoke with believes in the future of spatial computing, but feels Magic Leap’s poorly communicated direction makes it a risky platform to seriously consider for anything more than experimentation.
“Developing something usually takes a good amount of time. And when you pick a target platform, you’re partnering with that platform. It’s hard to pick Magic Leap as a partner when they won’t share key information with you,” the developer said. “Following someone who shares no information with you and keeps saying ‘Trust me, it’s all gonna work out!’ is often a bad business decision. They share their long term, 10–20 year vision all the time, but refuse to share the year’s vision. A company that wants to build the future needs to do well in the present.”
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Magic Leap isn’t the first to try to straddle the line between ‘dev kit’ and ‘consumer ready’ with a new product that’s not ready for prime time because of a lack of compelling content that still needs to be built up by developers.
In 2014, Oculus and Samsung launched the first Gear VR headset which they dubbed the ‘Innovator Edition’ (not dissimilar to Magic Leap One ‘Creator Edition’). And while we were also critical about the companies’ marketing in a grey area, Gear VR was more than 10 times less expensive ($200), and neither company was saying that the headset lacked some essential functionality that would be key to the future they were promising. That made it lower risk for both consumers and developers to buy in. In subsequent years, the headset was upgraded and got more content, and thus lost the ‘Innovator Edition’ tag, but the newer versions were essentially the same device/platform that had been promised to those who bought into the vision from the outset.
The post AT&T and Magic Leap Partnership is All About 5G, While Selling a $2,300 Headset Without It appeared first on Road to VR.
Game of Thrones is Getting the Mixed Reality Treatment on Magic Leap One
As if you didn’t know already but the biggest TV show on earth, Game of Thrones will soon be back on our screens for the 8th and final series. Naturally, AT&T and HBO weren’t going to let an opportunity like this go by without some wide-ranging promotion, announcing a marketing campaign which will see the GoT universe come to life thanks to Magic Leap.
Head down to the AT&T flagship stores in Boston (Boylston) on 1st April, Chicago (Michigan Avenue) on 3rd April and San Francisco (1 Powell) on 6th April and you’ll encounter The Dead Must Die, a Game of Thrones experience exclusive to Magic Leap.
After putting on the Magic Leap One headset fans step into a physical representation of King’s Landing which then transforms into an ominous icy scene. Here they will encounter a White Walker and lead the fight for the living.
“This is the biggest television event in recent history, in large part due to the show’s passionate, loyal and committed fan base,” said Valerie Vargas, SVP of advertising and creative services, AT&T in a statement. “In celebration of that fandom, and as fans ourselves, we have created unique experiences across all of our platforms that only AT&T and HBO can offer. With this campaign we aim to celebrate the show’s superfans and its permanent place in pop culture.”
Additionally, AT&T and Magic Leap have announced that the Magic Leap One headset will soon be sold in each of those flagship stores. Consumers can order online at att.com/magicleapone starting 5th April. Magic Leap One retails for $2,295 USD and can be purchased via monthly financing.
“AT&T’s investment in 5G will enable the widespread adoption of emerging and innovative technologies like Magic Leap’s spatial computing and will help to redefine how we access and experience everything from work, play, communication, media, healthcare and education,” said Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap. “The Magic Leap team and I are excited to take this next step in our exclusive partnership, tapping into AT&T’s vast retail distribution and the Magicverse innovations that will be powered by their game changing 5G network.”
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Magic Leap, reporting back with the latest announcements.
How 5G networks will make low-latency game streaming a reality
Faster speeds and more bandwidth are some of the many promises that 5G can deliver, but for gamers, the most important thing is low latency. To achieve low latency, carriers like AT&T and Verizon are exploring hybrid models for game streaming and mixed reality experiences.
The post How 5G networks will make low-latency game streaming a reality appeared first on Digital Trends.
Batman “Mixed Reality” Demo Shows VR Cloud Gaming Still Has a Long Way to Go
At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) it seemed every mobile network operator on the planet was hocking the next hotness in data connectivity, the magical alphanumeric ‘5G’. It’s true 5G is slated to make way for plenty of changes in how users consume mobile content thanks to a dramatic increase in bandwidth and lowered latency, but if you’re salivating over the possibilities for what that means for VR gaming in the near future, you may want to step back a bit.
Cloud gaming isn’t a new concept, at least in the world of traditional flatscreen games. Nvidia has GeForce Now, Sony has PlayStation Now, and both Google & Microsoft have their own future cloud gaming projects in the work too. While the infrastructure around gaming-focused edge computing is still very much in its early stages, requiring companies to maintain servers as close to the end-user as humanly possible, the hypothetical benefit to gamers is obvious. Extremely low-powered computers can stream games only previously available on the best of the best rigs.
Mobile network operators like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone and many others are signing on to paint the world with 5G starting this year. An increasing number of users will soon have access to data faster than even at-home fiber optic cables can provide, making the migration from wired to wireless almost a forgone conclusion in the minds of many. To wit, some of these companies publicly showed off VR cloud gaming actually working for the first time—one of the most difficult problems due to the inherent need to keep VR games chugging at or below the 20ms latency threshold, which is considered the bare minimum before users notice anything.
Stepping into Ericsson’s enormous MWC booth, second only to Huawei at over 6,000 mt² (~65,000 ft²), I cautiously ambled over to an abandoned station outfitted with a Vive Pro and Vive Wireless Adapter. The booth attendant claimed the “mixed reality” Batman experience, which was built in partnership by AT&T, Ericsson, Warner Bros. and Intel, was delivering a total latency between 4 – 6 ms through their mock-up 5G network. That’s basically the bare minimum you can expect, so I was excited to pop in and see for myself.
Although the real-time rendered experience didn’t suffer any discernible latency, it was an absolute failure at demonstrating why VR users want cloud gaming in the first place. In short: it was hot garbage.
With video from Vive Pro’s passthrough cameras placed as a backdrop behind my head (that’s totally “mixed reality,” right?), essentially what I experienced was a 180-degree mess. I was treated to extremely low poly graphics that looked about on par with what can be accomplished on a mobile VR headset like Gear VR or Oculus Go. Adding insult to injury, the two-minute experience, which featured Batman stopping the Scarecrow from—no joke—using 5G for evil, was presented to me in 3DOF and not in the full positional tracking Vive Pro was capable of. I was also told there was an interactive bit using a single Vive controller, but the booth attendants removed it because “nobody understood what to do.”
After seeing it in 3DOF and without any level of interactivity, I was pretty skeptical whether it was actually real-time rendered experience or just a 180-degree stereoscopic video. I was assured it all real-time.
I imagine this was done for the singular reason of showing the setup’s lowest possible latency. It’s not an unsubstantial achievement from a technical aspect either, but low latency is as good as useless if this is the sort of toothless VR content AT&T, Intel, Ericsson and Warner Bros. thinks will fit into a real-world use case. Cutting literally every possible corner on content to get latency down to something you can proudly advertise as ostensibly solved borders on willful deception.
There was a company at MWC pushing a more realistic version of VR cloud gaming though, warts and all. Two days earlier I got a chance to visit HTC’s booth where they were showing a similar setup streaming Superhot VR (2017) to a Vive Focus Plus over a mock-up 5G network. Although the implementation was far from perfect, it at least showed real SteamVR content running in the cloud, and delivered in 6DOF like you’d expect.
HTC’s streaming latency was well above 20ms, and it seemed to be heavily relying on time warp to keep things smooth. To me, it further drives home the fact that even in controlled environments with purpose-built networks completely dedicated to the task of remotely rendering VR games, there’s still a long way to go before we get plug-and-play VR cloud gaming.
While Ericsson’s demo failed to accurately sell the core idea behind the technology, it did manage to unwittingly reveal that VR cloud gaming is going to be an extreme balancing act when it comes at some point in the future.
The post Batman “Mixed Reality” Demo Shows VR Cloud Gaming Still Has a Long Way to Go appeared first on Road to VR.
Batman and The Scarecrow Will be at MWC19 Barcelona as a Mixed Reality Experience
While there might be many tech companies getting excited about 5G technology and what it can achieve, for the average person on the street 5G is that exhilarating. Which is why companies like AT&T and Ericsson have been looking at new ways of promoting the technology and what it can do. They’ve teamed up with Intel, Warner Bros. and DC Comics to showcase 5G at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019 in Barcelona this month using a mixed reality (MR) experience featuring Batman and Super-Villain The Scarecrow.
Visitors to the event will have an opportunity to experience a unique piece of immersive content combining both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. Using 5G technology the demonstration will see Batman defeating one of his arch rivals The Scarecrow in an action-packed immersive experience using a digital model of their encounter.
On display at the Ericsson and Intel booths during MWC19, the demo will be completely mobile, using the Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform in conjunction with a fully integrated 5G network powered by Ericsson Radio Base Stations.
The experience builds upon a mixed-reality experience designed by USC’s Mobile & Environmental Media Lab which conducted a proof-of-concept demonstration in December 2018 at the University of Southern California (USC) campus in Los Angeles.
“The low latency of 5G in combination with distributed cloud unlocks a world of possibilities in mixed reality, allowing for a more realistic and immersive entertainment experience,” said Kevin Zvokel, Vice President, Networks, Ericsson North America. “Working in collaboration with other innovative companies on this project, Ericsson is able to take visitors on an exciting journey with DC’s Super Heroes and Super-Villains, showcasing just what the technology means for the future of entertainment.”
“5G will change how we create and engage with entertainment, making it possible to virtually transport into new worlds of imagination and possibility,” said Barbara Roden, Vice President of Network Experiences, AT&T.
MWC19 takes place in Barcelona, Spain, from 25th – 28th February 2019. Should further details regarding the experience be released including a more public rollout, VRFocus will let you know.
AT&T, Ericsson & Intel to Showcase ‘The Power of 5G’ with Batman AR/VR Experience Soon
Mobile World Congress (MWC) is gearing up next week in Barcelona to play host to the latest and greatest in mobile technology, including the presumed Microsoft HoloLens 2. Today AT&T, Ericsson, Intel and Warner Bros. announced that they’ll be showing off a new implementation there of their combined efforts to bring 5G to location-based AR/VR venues using a new Batman experience.
Late last year the companies created a proof-of-concept demo running at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles, where students got a chance to experience what they call “a context-aware, mixed-reality experience” designed by USC’s Mobile & Environmental Media Lab.
Now fully kitted with a bonafide Batman experience to its name, the setup is said to let MWC-goers “see how Batman defeats DC Super-Villain The Scarecrow in an action-packed immersive experience using a digital model of their encounter.”
While not much is known at this time—including exactly which AR/VR hardware the companies are using—the experience is said to include a fully integrated 5G network powered by Ericsson Radio Base Stations and enabled by Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform, allowing expo visitors to “interact in the environment while being mobile.”
With the experience the companies hope to show off “a way forward for lightweight mixed reality devices,” a press statement says.
The collaboration between AT&T, Ericsson, Intel and Warner Bros. (with DC) is slated to demonstrate 5G’s capabilities, such as low latency, high bandwidth, fast scalability, and also how it will provide “a faster network and the flexibility for enabling an enhanced, multi-user mixed-reality experience.”
While it could be more bluster than muster at this point—we’ve seen 5G-powered setups in the past that did little more than deliver high-speed internet to backpack-mounted computers—the fact that Warner Bros. is eyeballing the out-of-home immersive entertainment sector using the technology could be a sign of greater implementations.
“At Warner Bros., we look forward to continuing to explore the power of 5G to deliver high-quality location-based entertainment experiences to our fans,” said Justin Herz, exec. vice president of Warner Bros. Entertainment’s digital product, platform and strategy division. “It is by working closely with partners who are leaders in 5G that we can develop compelling immersive user experiences that will break through to a mass audience and bring our most iconic characters, such as DC’s Batman and The Scarecrow, to life.”
The demonstration will be available in both the Ericsson booth (#2O60 in Hall 2) and Intel booth (#3E31 in Hall 3) in Fira de Barcelona, taking place February 24 – 28 in Barcelona, Spain.
We’ll have feet on the ground in Barcelona next week, so check back soon for breaking news and all things AR/VR.
The post AT&T, Ericsson & Intel to Showcase ‘The Power of 5G’ with Batman AR/VR Experience Soon appeared first on Road to VR.