SK will launch "Social Virtual Reality" and a variety of 5G presentations at the 2018 Mobile World Congress booth

SK Telecom, South Korea's largest mobile operator, announced today that it will launch "social virtual reality" and a variety of 5G demonstrations, including "holographic artificial intelligence", at its booth at the 2018 Mobile World Congress next week. The presentation will take place from February 26th to March 1st in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

To illustrate the gap between 4G and 5G speeds, SK Telecom will show how improvements in virtual reality technology have evolved its existing Oksusu service, which allows Korean users to chat while watching videos. Oksusu Social VR will use Samsung's Gear VR and Google Daydream to display an 80-inch equivalent 1080p TV screen and the avatars of users and their friends, as well as body movements and facial expressions. Users of 4G VR services will be able to watch and comment on movies, League of Legends games, concerts and sports events as if they were watching content on TV.

In contrast, the 5G version of Oksusu Social Virtual Reality (Oksusu Social VR) will include 8K video, which will be 16 times more detailed than the 4G version, and also has the ability to stream live from remote cities, allowing users to feel them. In fact, I am visiting a foreign destination and attending a live concert. SK Telecom explained that due to the limited speed of existing networks, this real-time virtual reality technology is not feasible on 4G, but it is feasible on 5G networks.

The operator will also show real-time 5G data streams, 4G and 5G simultaneous streams for transmission over different RF bands, and autonomous 5G vehicle testing announced earlier this month - 3D HD maps, moving cars to everything (C -V2X) communication, as well as 5G self-driving cars.

Interestingly, SK Telecom also promised that visitors to the Mobile World Congress could “see the future of artificial intelligence in the form of holographic artificial intelligence”. Without specific details, the operator claims that the hologram AI provides "a new mobile device communication experience for humans."

In April last year, competitors KT and Verizon conducted the world's first 5G live hologram call, in which a Verizon employee appeared as a hologram on the display of the KT headquarters. KT said at the time that commercial 5G networks would enable real-time holographic meetings between people, and now SK Telecom also said that holograms will become a major new advantage for 5G.