For another year, operators have come to MWC 2023 full of use cases featuring 5G or NB-IoT connectivity (with the permission of the metaverse, of course). Smart agricultural solutions, digital twins for industrial production, sensors for fire detection and flood prevention...

But if there was a demo that particularly attracted attention, it was undoubtedly Telefónica's holographic telepresence system with 3D capture. It has been tested, people have become holograms... And here we will tell you the result.

Your mini-me in three dimensions and next to you

Telefónica, in collaboration with Evercoast, Intel and AWS, has brought an experience called 'Making Holographic Telepresence happen' to its stand at MWC, allowing visitors to enter a capture room and see their 3D image customized in avatar format. Live and in real time.

The process is very simple. Just walk into that room and stand in the middle of it, no sensors or standing still. Intel cameras are responsible for capturing images and Evercoast software creates an avatar or 3D hologram for embedding in virtual reality and augmented reality environments.

The result is a volumetric figure that faithfully reproduces the image and movements in real time. Outside the room, the rest of the audience can see this image through a tablet or computer thanks to an Evercoast program that allows them to "teleport" to various settings, such as the bottom of the sea or a basketball court.

It is possible to take that hologram into the real environment and resize it to be smaller or larger than us. In fact, when you focus on the tablet visitor when he is in the room, you can see his hologram next to him making the same movements. And of course, it's impossible to resist the urge to interact with him.

How to create and teleport a hologram

To demonstrate this holographic 3D telepresence system, Telefónica has set up a complex stage where it has combined a volumetric capture room with technologies such as 5G, Edge Computing and fiber.

That room is equipped with 21 Intel RealSense depth cameras, which generate 60 to 70 gigabits of raw information and all this data is processed on a local server with Evercoast software, capable of creating volumetric video in real time.

The fiber (in this case, Telefónica's) is used to send the live volumetric stream and upload the recordings to the Edge, which can occupy 20 Gbps for a 30-second recording. And it is the Edge centers that process all this information for live telepresence applications or to render recordings.

Finally, thanks to Evercoast's technology, these volumetric videos can be viewed in any augmented reality environment, 3D engine or web environment. And that's where 5G comes into play; it is necessary to access these volumetric videos from a tablet, mobile phone or augmented or mixed reality virtual glasses.
Therefore, the idea of this solution is to use the person's 3D avatar in real time, which can be used in two ways: live volumetric streaming or recordings integrated in virtual reality and augmented reality environments.

In the future, regardless of where the person is, we will be able to transfer their volumetric image to any virtual environment, such as a meeting room. And it could be applied to being able to interact in real time, for example in immersive education, virtual studio interviews, celebrity visits or virtual guides.