This is what life will be like in ten years thanks to 6G

Spectators at the hologram presentation of a Maisie Wilen collection at New York Fashion Week last February. KENA BETANCUR (AFP)

The life drawn in science fiction begins to be reality.

Dozens of devices connected simultaneously in each home, communications with virtual presence, advanced robotics, traffic control and instant logistics or industrial operations, telemedicine, new ways of educating, digital twins, the internet of the senses... The list of applications waiting for the new generation of wireless technologies, 6G, is endless.

In a decade, a new technological revolution will begin with billions of connected humans, devices, vehicles, robots and drones.

It already begins to take the first steps.

The main technological multinationals meet from this Monday until May 13 in Seville to celebrate a new edition of the 5G Forum.

This generation was born with the claim of more speed and capacity: 20 gigabytes per second and reaction in a millisecond.

But its applications have gone much further than those virtues.

According to Ricardo Medina, general director of the organizer of the international meeting in Seville (Medina Media Events), "it turns out that how good it could be had not been sufficiently valued."

The applications of this technology are oriented to the present with an eye on the immediate future, on 6G, which will allow the exchange of up to one terabyte per second and latency (response) of 0.1 milliseconds.

For Tommy Svensson, professor of communication systems at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), "the expectations are high and the wish list is long".

Chalmers is part of the team of 25 entities involved in the European Hexa-X research project for the implementation of the new generation.

The members of this group consider that, "although 5G has made it possible to consume digital media anywhere and at any time, the technology of the future should allow us to integrate into completely virtual or digital worlds."

“In the world of 2030,” the consortium notes, “human intelligence will be augmented by being tightly coupled and seamlessly intertwined with network and digital technologies.

With advances in artificial intelligence, machines can transform data into reasoning and decisions that will help humans better understand and act on our world.

As today's home and industrial machines transform into swarms of multipurpose robots and drones,

Holographic illustration of an interconnected smart city represented on a mobile.

istock

Svensson points out that, in the next ten years – “or even sooner”, he predicts – 6G will enable the internet of the senses.

“This means that we will be able to experience internet applications using all five human senses, not just sight and hearing like today.”

“And our homes, offices, factories and cities,” he adds, “will be represented on a constantly updated interactive map, capable of predicting what will happen in the real world.

We will be able to communicate through holograms and work with intelligent surfaces positioned in three dimensions with information about the orientation of objects.”

Holograms will make it possible to interact with all kinds of objects anywhere or to enjoy an impossible spectacle, such as the María Callas concerts held in theaters around the world two years ago, or to recreate the presence of loved ones or to hold a meeting almost face-to-face kilometers away, like the experience of the first holtransported humans for a telemedicine test on the International Space Station

(ISS, for its acronym in English), or go to the supermarket without leaving home or participate in the parallel world that the metaverse promises.

“All this will be possible”, according to the scientist, “thanks to high transmission speeds, low latency, knowledge of the environment, positioning and orientation, integrated detection, the network of networks and decentralized computing power in the mobile networks.

6G can guarantee energy efficient, reliable, robust and secure communication.”

Image of doctor Josef Schmid, holographically transferred to the International Space Station in October 2021.

Akihiro Nakao, Professor of Engineering at the University of Tokyo and member of a Finnish and Japanese research team on 6G development, agrees: “It's not just about higher speeds and faster response, although these things will get better.

6G goals include a massive improvement in energy efficiency, security based on quantum mechanics, network optimization powered by artificial intelligence, integration with satellite networks, and more.

For everyday life, all of this means that people will have a more seamless experience communicating with each other, as well as interacting with services and devices.”

Akihiro Nakao adds that “some areas of life that could benefit from 6G include healthcare, where low-power embedded sensors could communicate real-time health data to doctors or systems, or even disaster response, as the integration with satellite platforms means that if ground infrastructure is damaged, essential communication can be maintained.”

Andy Molisch, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi, identifies three applications that will mark the development of the new generation of communications: haptic internet, holographic communications and

, a computing infrastructure that improves the efficiency of applications, devices (internet of things) and local edge servers.

"These three areas," according to Molisch, "have the potential to change communications, health, transportation, education, and more."

Another of the great advances, according to the members of the ENABLE-6G European project, led by Domenico Giustiniano and Joerg Widmer, will be

.

This concept, which supposes the exact virtual representation of a physical object, will allow medical research to determine the molecular reaction to a treatment before administering it or rehearsing a surgical intervention or knowing the response of an infrastructure or anticipating the behavior of traffic or foreseeing the result of an industrial process, among thousands of other applications.

Hyundai, among other companies, is already using the latest virtual reality technology to transform car design.

They will also improve location systems, essential for autonomous driving or remote-controlled industrial processes.

According to Henk Wymeersch, professor of communication systems at Chalmers, the new mobile technology “will offer increasingly sophisticated geolocation functions with an accuracy of up to less than a centimeter”.

The technology will likewise enable multi-channel transmission of uncompressed ultra-high-definition video, ultra-high-speed, short-distance data transfer between devices, as well as chip-to-chip communications.

As Svensson explains, at the individual level, 6G opens the door to the internet of the senses.

According to Marianna Obrist, Professor of Multisensory Interfaces at University College London, “although interactive technologies are a fundamental and common part of our daily lives, the typical user experience only involves the senses of sight and hearing”.

“However,” she adds, “touch, taste and smell have a huge impact on health, safety, leisure, work and our general well-being.

Therefore, multi-sensory experiences, if embedded in interactive technologies in a user-friendly way, could open up entirely new product, technology and service opportunities.”

Highly integrated flexible microelectronic 3D sensors perceive the movement of fine hairs on the artificial skin.

Research Group Prof. Dr. Oliver G. Schmidt

The European project Sense X is working on the integration of these senses and devices such as the

, a system for tasting based on the principle of acoustic levitation.

As Obrist explains, this model "uses high-intensity sound waves to suspend matter, in this case flavor particles, in the air."

“We developed a contactless device that delivers taste stimuli in the air, without any restraint.

In this way, the user is free to interact with the stimulus using their tongue.”

They also work with the implementation of touch technology to design multisensory experiences.

In this sense, a research team from the University of Chemnitz and Dresden (Germany) has taken a big step forward in the development of sensitive electronic skins (e-skin) with integrated artificial hairs.

Electronic skins are flexible electronic systems that attempt to mimic the sensitivity of human skin.

challenges

This immediate future has to solve some challenges.

The first is that 6G signals, to achieve data rates of one terabyte per second and response times as low as 0.1 milliseconds, must be transmitted in the terahertz range, beyond 300 GHz. This means that the bandwidth will be very high, but also that the range of the signals will be very short and could be blocked by walls and other obstacles.

This implies a greater number of base stations, although they will be smaller, and new types of antennas and a large number of these to provide sufficient coverage.

As Andy Molisch explains, "at higher frequencies, the waves become more difficult to handle, which makes it easier to lose connection."

“New algorithms must also be developed that allow processing on the new bandwidth and completely new devices (

).

There is still a lot we need to understand before we can start building practical tools that work in this space, that we understand communication at these frequencies enough to make 6G an everyday reality,” he adds.

For Svensson, in the face of this inconvenience, he starts from an advantage: the new generation is born with artificial intelligence and machine learning support already available.

Future 6G networks also require improved wireless communications to provide accurate environment sensing and significantly reduce the energy footprint per device in order to avoid a huge increase in overall network power consumption.

Two key technologies are being worked on in this field: low-power visible light communication (which uses LED lights to transmit data through the visible spectrum) and reconfigurable smart surfaces (which provide communication capabilities to the surface of walls and objects).

According to Joerg Widmer, Principal Investigator of Enable 6G, “Integration of Reflective Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) will improve network capacity and higher tolerance to link loss, thereby improving mobile services for users. that citizens and industry depend on.”

Finally, the avalanche of data poses a challenge to guarantee privacy, for which we are working on automatic learning mechanisms that preserve it,

“to share with the network infrastructure”, explains Giustiniano, “only the metadata necessary to provide these services, while protecting personal data”.

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