Holopresence Demonstration at MWC 2023

Mobile World Conference (MWC) Barcelona 2023 (27 February to 2 March) saw a whole range of mobile comms use cases – including a 3D holographic telepresence system from Telefónica.

Telefónica, in collaboration with Evercoast, Intel and AWS, demonstrated its ‘Making holographic telepresence happen’ system on its stand at MWC, so that visitors could enter a capture room and see, in real time, their 3D figure in the form of a custom avatar.

Attendees at the show entered the room and stood in its centre, while Intel cameras captured images and Evercoast software generated the hologram avatar in 3D to insert into remote virtual and augmented reality environments.

The hologram avatar reproduces the surface and movements of the volumetric figure in real time. Outside the room, the rest of the show attendees can see the figure on the monitor of a device using a Evercoast program that allows you to ‘teleport’ it to different settings.

The Telefónica-room combined the volumetric capture room with complementary technologies such as 5G, Edge Computing and fibre.

The room is equipped with 21 RealSense depth cameras from Intel, which generate between 60 and 70 gigabits of raw information which is processed on a local server with Evercoast software, capable of generating volumetric video in real time.

The fibre from Telefónica is used to send the live volumetric stream and upload the recordings to the Edge, which can occupy up to 20 Gbps for 30 seconds of recording, and process the information for live telepresence applications.

Finally, Evercoast’s technology allows the volumetric videos to be inserted into any augmented reality environment, 3D engine or web environment for viewing. The bandwidth and speed of a 5G network is needed to access the volumetric videos from a device such as a tablet, mobile or virtual, augmented or mixed reality glasses.