Nokia: Speeding up real-time XR trials in 5G industrial environments

The Industry X project enables technology solution providers to demonstrate the added value of digital edge and XR solutions. Through the development and demonstration of new services and technologies, the project aims to further enhance the competence of the metaverse ecosystem. In particular, it will tackle key barriers to adopting digital edge and XR technology in utilities, including edge computing, systems integration, and interoperability. The project will focus on fostering collaborative development towards open architecture and standardisation.

The novelty of the project’s research lays in its approach to creating globally applicable, resource-efficient edge and XR solutions with versatile capabilities and technologies. Together, these enable system solutions in intensive industries to manage their data processing in line with future customer demands and service requirements.

5G will revolutionize industrial communication and data flow capabilities, enhancing industrial automation and improving efficiency through digital twins, AI, environment sensing, and interaction in Industry 4.0 environments. Collecting vast amount of data, however, also presents challenges for data visualization and (virtual) asset management within and across industries. This creates a need for new ways of accessing, visualizing and interacting with data, as well as virtual and physical assets. The spatial environment will become a platform for processing information through VR and XR, facilitating human-machine interaction and data manipulation. Moreover, digital information interoperability will become a vital enabler for cross-industry processes in the 5G era.

There is a growing need for a distributed but centrally managed processing entity in the industrial sector. Such an entity should be utilized to manage workflows, deploy and run necessary sensing and encoding functions, and facilitate collaboration among different actors in the system. Distributed intelligence, an architecture that breaks computation workloads hosted in a centralized system into a combination of a central node and end nodes, is a promising solution. This approach involves multiple machines in various locations, each with different form factors and processing capabilities.

The research focus of the Industry X joint project is on leveraging modern data analysis IoT techniques to address various challenges across different industry sectors. These challenges include decision making, quality control, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance. The goal is to utilize theoretical advances to enhance the capabilities of participating companies and facilitate their future international growth.

One of the main challenges in implementing these methods in commercial products lies in navigating though the multitude of available options and determining which ones are essential for a specific application. Additionally, building a sustainable business model with edge and XR technologies presents another challenge, as different solutions need to be explored and evaluated.

Veturi 2.0 Competitive EDGE joint project Industry X aims at strengthening Finnish companies and academia in becoming global leaders in edge-enabled research and technology within the industry 5G domain. This leadership will be realized on different fronts including academic research, product R&D, technology development and international collaboration including standardization.

About Nokia

Nokia is a B2B technology innovation leader in networking, bringing together the world’s people, machines and devices to realize the potential of digital in every industry.

For more than 30 years, we have defined many of the fundamental technologies used in any device that is connected to a cellular network and we take a leadership role in standards setting. We are also a leader in multimedia research and standardization. Since 2000 we have invested around 150 billion EUR in R&D, and our annual R&D investment is more than 4 billion EUR. In 2023 we filed patents on over 2,300 new inventions in areas including next generation multimedia communications, artificial intelligence and machine learning at the edge and on-devices as well as XR-supported digital twins for 5G-enabled industry 4.0 applications.

Learn more about Nokia.

Contact persons:
Jukka Saarinen, jukka.saarinen@nokia.com
Ville-Veikko Mattila, ville-veikko.mattila@nokia.com
Emre Aksu, emre.aksu@nokia.com