Harnessing the Power of HORSE Network Infrastructure to Revolutionize HOLO light’s Immersive Technologies

Authored by: HOLO Light

In the rapidly evolving landscape of extended reality (XR) technologies, industries across the globe are leveraging XR to enhance workflows, from immersive training sessions to remote support and cutting-edge product design. However, the true potential of XR is often constrained by the limitations of existing network infrastructures. The HORSE project stands at the forefront of addressing these challenges, ensuring robust, resilient, and secure network capabilities essential for next-generation XR applications.

Hololight’s XR technology will utilize HORSE’s network infrastructure to enhance the XR functionalities and immersive experiences. Hololight Space is an advanced application within the realm of industrial augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), designed to facilitate the seamless visualization of 3D CAD data. It enables collaboration on digital twins for various purposes such as reviewing designs, strategizing factory layouts, conducting risk assessments, ensuring quality assurance, and showcasing products to stakeholders in order to enhance the process of decision-making. Hololight Space supports multi-player modes for virtual fast prototyping with 3D CAD files and enables multi-user experiences. The XR mobile devices, however, have limitations to meet the industrial use case requirements of high processing power and display resolution. A stand-alone XR glass can only visualize up to 1,000,000 polygons seamlessly. To overcome this limitation, the key is to use external resources using a technology called remote rendering and XR streaming enabled by Hololight Stream. Hololight Stream SDK is a remote rendering solution that enables real-time streaming of entire AR and VR applications allowing the visualization and interaction with highly polygonal, data-intensive content such as graphics-intensive 3D CAD models. This is achieved by offloading the rendering operation to powerful servers, either on-prem or on the cloud.

This innovative solution not only ensures the delivery of XR content with utmost precision and realism but also offers comprehensive compatibility across multiple devices and seamless integration with the widely popular Unity 3D platform, thereby simplifying the overall process of application creation and deployment for developers. By leveraging these advanced capabilities, organizations stand to benefit from optimized resource allocation, reduced developmental overheads, and heightened levels of data protection and system flexibility, thereby fortifying the robustness and expansiveness of their XR initiatives. Through Hololight Stream SDK, Hololight Space application is streamed to the XR devices.

This enables:

1. Enhanced performance for high-quality visualization of 3D data: Hololight Stream outsources the rendering process to an external server or cloud infrastructure. This approach offers potentially unlimited performance, enabling the visualization of GPU-intensive graphics effects and the interaction with highly polygonal, data-intensive content. The limitations are now defined by the server and the network.
2. Cross-platform, device-agnostic approach for accelerated application development: The device-agnostic approach to XR devices and server infrastructure, facilitated through deployed client applications, significantly reduces the development effort required for XR applications. By building a single server application, new applications can be developed with minimal effort and without constraints or limitations. This methodology accelerates application development on new platforms, achieving speeds at least ten times faster than traditional methods.
3. High privacy level through data streaming: The XR application can be deployed on either an on-premise server or a public cloud infrastructure, providing the customer with complete control over the storage of sensitive data. With the implementation of remote rendering, data is not stored on the XR device but is exclusively streamed. This approach is critical for security, particularly in the event of device loss or hacker attacks. Additionally, centralized management simplifies compliance with current security standards.
4. Preservation of data integrity without reduction or simplification: Computing power is crucial for visualizing 3D models with millions of polygons, high-quality graphics, or numerous components. Historically, the data quality had to be significantly reduced to function on mobile XR devices. However, with Hololight Stream, high-polygon content can now be visualized and manipulated in real-time without any need for data simplification.

Despite these advantages, the rapid pace of technological advancement and evolving business demands pose significant challenges. When rendering and streaming processes are offloaded from the end device, it becomes imperative to establish a fast, secure, and reliable transfer to ensure a high-quality user experience. Technologies such as 5G and distributed networks are essential for delivering superior augmented and virtual reality experiences. While immersive technologies enable novel business opportunities, the integration of 5G, edge computing, and edge cloud infrastructure provides the flexibility necessary to realize even the most complex use cases.

HORSE Platform: Enhancing XR Network Capabilities

The HORSE platform addresses critical network needs by enabling low-latency and high-throughput data flow, essential for seamless XR experiences. The HORSE platform aims to develop an advanced, human-centric, open-source, and sustainable 6G infrastructure platform. This platform will address the challenges of smart connectivity, service management, and security in 6G networks. It incorporates cutting-edge technologies like predictive threat detection, programmable networking, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), AI-based security, and Digital Twins. These innovations will enable flexible, scalable, and high-performance network services, supporting a wide range of applications and ensuring robust security and efficient data processing.

HORSE-Enabled Use Cases in XR

1. Rendering XR in Local Networks: Utilizing HORSE’s 5G/6G infrastructure, remote application rendering involves a Server Application and a Client Application connected via WebRTC.
2. Fast-Prototyping in Multi-Player Mode: Designers and engineers can collaborate on 3D CAD models using Hololight Space from different locations simultaneously. The HORSE platform supports the network requirements for these multi-player sessions, ensuring smooth and efficient collaboration.
3. Multi-User Experiences: Multiple users can independently work on rendered CAD files with their own application instances in the same network. This common XR environment setup is facilitated by HORSE’s network infrastructure, supporting at least three end-users running sessions simultaneously on Hololight Space.
4. Industrial Metaverse and XR Devices: In industrial settings, stakeholders can collaborate using AR and VR for tasks like fast prototyping, factory planning, or training. The HORSE platform ensures the necessary high-bandwidth, low-latency, and end-to-end security measures for these complex and interactive XR applications.

The HORSE project is poised to revolutionize the XR industry by providing the robust, resilient, and secure network infrastructure necessary for the next generation of immersive applications. By enhancing the functionalities of applications like Hololight Space by empowering technologies like Hololight Stream, HORSE enables detailed, high-quality XR experiences, paving the way for innovative industrial applications and the future of immersive technologies.