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 go on to describe the specific features that users will have with the advent of the 5G era, and talk about how the usual simple processes that we are familiar with can 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 features, 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 interactions online

Already now 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 can see the distance to each of the points, sort the places by popularity or distance, and then open the application with a map to get a convenient route. In the 5G era, things will become much easier. It will be enough just to raise a smartphone with 5G support to eye level and “scan” your surroundings. All the nearest restaurants will be marked on the screen along with information about the menu, ratings and reviews of visitors, and convenient signs will tell you 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 identification of objects, but this creates a large load on the network due to the amount of information transmitted. More precisely, it would create, if not for the data transfer rate and the huge bandwidth of 5G networks.

The second “ingredient” through which such a technology can exist is low latency. With the proliferation of 5G networks, users will notice that such tips on the screens of their smartphones will appear faster, almost instantly. When the captured video is uploaded to the “cloud”, the 5G image recognition system is already starting to select among all the buildings seen those 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 for this, 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 on a family holiday, birthday, or wedding, each of the guests himself uploads photos and video clips from the event on Facebook or Instagram pages, and there are no “common” functions like the ability to simultaneously apply filters to your favorite frame or edit video together. And after the holiday, you can find all the pictures and videos taken only if each of the participants posted them with some unique and common tag for everyone. And still they will be scattered on the pages of your friends and relatives, and not collected into one common album.

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

To implement such a project, several factors are necessary 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 happen almost instantly. Real-time file processing can be a slow and complex process if several people work on them at once. But the speed and bandwidth of 5G networks will also help to remove the delay and freezes that would appear when cropping photos or applying new filters. In addition, AI can help with your projects. For example, your 5G-enabled device will automatically identify your friends and relatives in pictures or videos and ask 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 the website) for it, you need to decide on the place where the sofa will stand in the room, measure free space, think about how much it will fit with the rest of the environment ...

5G technologies will help simplify this process . Thanks to the 5G-smartphone you will no longer need roulette and questions whether the sofa that you like in the store is combined with a coffee table and carpet color. It is enough to download 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’s screen, which you can “place” in the room yourself and immediately understand whether this particular model suits 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 the new sofa. Rajan Patel, CTO of Google Augmented Reality, used the Google Lens app at the 2018 Snapdragon Tech Summit for this very reason. At the same time, he demonstrated how important the data transfer speed of 5G networks is for the fast loading of models and furniture textures. And after loading the augmented reality technologies, they can arrange a “virtual” sofa in a place chosen by the user, and its dimensions will be 100% identical to those 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 lives, and routine tasks (even those that we don’t suspect about) will become easier and more enjoyable.