A Look at the 5G Open Innovation Lab and One of Their Newest Graduates – Taqtile
There’s a lot of buzz around 5G internet. While it’s already rolled out to some devices in some cities, it’s still a myth to most of us. The good news is that there’s an organization looking to deliver a functional 5G ecosystem by the time 5G rolls around. ARPost talked with 5G Open Innovation Lab’s general partner Jim Brisimitzis and Taqtile CEO Dirck Schou to learn more.
Why 5G Matters to XR
As with every previous generation of the internet, 5G will bring consumers faster speeds. Most consumers don’t actually need faster speeds for most of the applications that they currently run. However, the XR community sees 5G as enabling the next generation of applications.
“We think of 5G as, ‘oh great, I’m going to have a better cell connection when I’m walking around.’ Maybe it’ll do better videos or whatever, but is that a quantum leap from 4G for the consumer?” Schou said in a video interview with ARPost. “For the carrier that might just be keeping up with the Joneses, but for enterprise it’s a very different thing.”
Where 4G internet allowed streaming video, 5G could allow modes of information transfer that can change the ways in which we work.
“If a picture tells a thousand words, and a video tells a thousand pictures, a hologram tells a thousand videos,” said Schou. “Right now, the network just can’t handle it.”
Schou is the CEO of Taqtile, an AR company specializing in front-line skills training, specifically addressing what Schou called “The Silver Tsunami.”
“Let’s say for every three expert workers that are retiring out of the workforce, maybe you have one worker coming in trying to do the job of three people, so the question becomes, how do you train that one person to do the jobs of three experts?” said Schou. “The answer to that question is, you do not. But, what you can do is give them a tool that allows them to be an expert.”
The company has previously received grants and awards from organizations like Microsoft’s 2020 Partner of the Year Award for mixed reality and Magic Leap’s Independent Creator Program in 2019. They also recently announced that they are graduates of the 5G Open Innovation Lab.
The 5G Open Innovation Lab
“5G, in our minds, is not just a move forward in wireless standards,” said Brisimitzis. “What we wanted to do is create an ecosystem where developers and startups like Taqtile could have a chance to explore what’s possible in the future with 5G today.”
Brisimitzis is a general partner at the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Founded by NASA, computing giant Intel, and 5G pioneer T-Mobile, the 5G OI Lab invites tech companies to partake in a twelve-week course exploring the driving use-cases and developers in 5G internet.
The organization has a number of additional plans that have been delayed due to coronavirus, including having a physical lab space and doing larger events to engage and educate the public. For the time being, they’re looking for the next round for the program – which may also involve Taqtile.
“Taqtile is representative of all of the startups that we work with, they’re all enterprise-purposed,” said Brisimitzis. “Taqtile graduated but they’re still very much part of our family.”
It’s a role that Taqtile very much looks forward to.
“As an alumnus, we are going to be part of this family forever,” said Schou. ”Hopefully, as 5G starts to grow faster and get more mature and our products get more mature, as the whole graduating class becomes more mature, we then will become ambassadors for the program and we become mentors.”
Taqtile Moving Tech Forward
Taqtile is one of a number of use cases illustrating the practical employment of 5G. The 5G Open Innovation Lab ensures that by the time that the next generation of the internet is available to most consumers, it will already have a working environment.