Vodafone looks to ease AR loads with HyperRealityHub

Immersive technologies such as augmented, mixed and virtual reality are rapidly coalescing into a spatial computing ecosystem set to create a new world of work, but one key gating factor has been the lack of user-friendly devices.

Aiming to amend this, Vodafone has introduced the HyperRealityHub, designed to shift the paradigm from bulkier extended reality (XR) headsets to lightweight, affordable glasses that support shared immersive experiences for businesses.

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, the HyperRealityHub is designed to enable a split compute solution with support for external cameras to monitor the movement and location of multiple users.

Vodafone said this reduces the computing requirements on XR devices, lowering energy consumption and weight to allow more users to experience lightweight AR devices, such as AR glasses powered by Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 Platform. The hub’s distributed architecture is also intended to allow for computing requirements to be shared between the hub, the glasses and across the cloud.

The solution has high edge AI capabilities and has Vodafone apps built on the Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform. They are all connected by Vodafone’s responsive networks and intellectual property (IP) architecture. In addition to the initial HyperRealityHub, Vodafone has a vision for a variant which can connect multiple users, enabling them to interact in a shared immersive experience using both Wi-Fi 7 and 5G.

Looking at potential use cases, Vodafone said that the new product will enhance the way people interact with technology and each other, at work and play across many areas such as telehealth, wellness and fitness, hospitality, remote-support, creative collaboration, education and entertainment.

At the forthcoming Mobile World Congress, Vodafone said that it would demonstrate a wellness use case where through wearing the AR glasses, users will be guided through exercises by a virtual agent named VEDA. By offloading tasks from the AR glasses onto the HyperRealityHub, Vodafone assures that users can still benefit from high-performance remote rendering without compromising their experience. In a telehealth digital-twin showcase called uMii, it will be possible to interact with VEDA as a hologram-like projection without the need for glasses.

At MWC 2024, Vodafone will be showing third-party developers, aggregators and corporate customers a way to create their own new services through APIs that give them access to the enhanced capabilities of its Vodafone’s network.

The focal point for these APIs is Vodafone’s Developer Marketplace. Among the new APIs on show include those designed to help developers and enterprises to tackle online fraud and protect the digital identities of employees and customers. Based on the new industry-wide Camara standard, these apps are intended to let banking, financial services and online retail industries tackle identity fraud.