Pioneer in Spain

The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) - through its Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM) - and Telefónica, in collaboration with Nokia, have launched Spain's first laboratory for the development and testing of holographic use cases based on 5G communications, including the 26 GHz millimetre band.

This initiative becomes one of the leading Spanish testbeds for private companies and public institutions wishing to validate their applications based on the new generation of mobile telephony. The laboratory's equipment will include advanced cameras to design and develop immersive holographic applications in different fields, such as education and entertainment, through volumetric capture.

In this sense, when the 5G network is deployed in the laboratory with all its elements in operation, tests related to the use cases of holographic applications such as streaming holograms for teaching or entertainment or immersive videoconferencing through hyperrealistic avatars can be performed.

The UPV will be the end user of the holographic laboratory for educational use cases. To this end, the iTEAM-UPV institute is creating a research team in holographic technologies to explore the many possibilities of this innovative technology in academia and to design the holographic communications of the future.

"Thanks to this collaboration with Telefónica and Nokia, we are setting up a reference laboratory for the definition and validation of these holographic communications of the future," highlights the head of the laboratory, David Gómez Barquero, senior lecturer in the communications department and deputy director of research at the UPV's iTEAM institute.

Telefónica is providing support for the operability of the 5G network in the 26 GHz band and the design of network test plans in this band. It will also provide the design and development of immersive holography applications through real-time volumetric capture in three dimensions (3D), the computing infrastructure for cloud and edge computing in advanced 5G networks for the transmission of immersive content, the optimisation of the capture, production, and transmission of those immersive content, as well as the performance of QoE (Quality of Experience) tests, in addition to collaborating on demonstrations and pilots of immersive communications.

Meanwhile, Nokia will provide the equipment for the advanced 5G network, both the access network and the support for configuring advanced functionalities such as Network Slicing.

Technologies

Specifically, the technologies that will be used in the laboratory to develop use cases are 5G SA and NSA (5G Stand Alone and Non-Stand Alone) in the 26 GHz band, which offers high speed, high capacity, and low latency to provide the best 5G experience in areas of intensive traffic, in addition to applying cloud technologies; edge computing; network slicing and holography.

For the implementation of this laboratory, the activities of iTEAM-UPV and Telefónica, together with Nokia, are focused on optimising the infrastructure and performance of both cloud and edge computing that rely on the 5G SA of 26 GHz to enable the efficient transmission of high capacity and thus the execution of different network use cases and holographic applications with immersive content.

The launch of this laboratory is part of the "Avanzando-5G-Immersivo" project of the UNICO I+D 5G plan, funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, whose main objective is to strengthen research, development, and innovation activities between universities and technology companies to promote the consolidation of Spain as a leader in innovation projects with NextGenEU funding from the European Commission.

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