News

The French operator’s virtual reality (VR) tour of Notre-Dame serves as a window into the future of VR, with profits going towards the cathedral’s restoration

Since the Middle Ages, Notre-Dame de Paris has been one of the most celebrated and recognisable buildings in the world. A focal point of French history, the cathedral has played host to countless pivotal events, from the crowning of Henry VI of England as King of France in 1431 to the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor in 1804. For many, Notre-Dame represents not just the city of Paris, but the indomitable spirit of France itself.

Perhaps this is why, when a fire broke out on the evening of April 15 2019, images of the building engulfed in flame evoked such visceral sadness, not only within France but around the globe.

Now, four years on, in the midst of an extensive reconstruction process, French operator Orange is using VR to allow visitors to explore Notre-Dame throughout its history.

Orange’s ‘Eternal Notre-Dame’ was first launched in January 2022 in Orange’s facility in La Défense after two years of planning. It received around 5,000 visitors in the first six months and, after a year, was transferred to its current location adjacent to Notre-Dame itself. Since then, the experience has subsequently received over 60,000 visitors.

The experience itself takes place in an underground car park adjacent to the cathedral that has been repurposed to allow up to 100 headset-wearing visitors to wander freely, exploring the monument in the virtual world for around 45 minutes.

Alongside a headset, the experience requires visitors to don an LED-studded backpack that provides power and processing for the experience, while Wi-Fi infrastructure is used to track the users’ positioning within the facility and avoid collisions. While comfortable for the duration of the experience, this somewhat cumbersome setup illustrates one of the main obstacles facing the broader adoption of VR outside of a dedicated home-set up.

Nonetheless, for Morgan Bouchet, Orange’s global head of XR and metaverse, VR technology is on the right path. Devices are getting smaller, sleeker, and more powerful, and the advent of edge computing will allow the processing power to be offloaded to the cloud, eliminating the need for backpacks.

“In the Orange Lab at the Orange Innovation Park, we are exploring this scenario without the backpack thanks to edge computing. To stream the billions of polygons for the experience we need a very specific infrastructure, but thanks to 5G and fibre we can deliver it,” he said.

For Orange, part of the motivation for developing this experience was, of course, civic duty – of the €30 ticket price for the experience, Orange’s share (€10) is donated directly to Notre-Dame’s reconstruction.

But beyond helping to play a role in restoration, the value for Orange is also in demonstrating the potential of extended reality (XR) to enterprise customers. According to Bouchet a number of the operator’s B2B customers have already taken part in the experience and are reportedly ‘blown away’ by the technology’s potential.

“For Orange it’s a way to express something new,” said Bouchet. “We’re meeting with clients on the B2B side – they want to explore and understand the value of this technology and how they can use it in future. This is a good use case to demonstrate those capabilities.”

Bouchet said that major opportunities were available in segments like the automotive sector and healthcare, with virtual training being a key use case for both the private and public sectors.

As for the future of the ‘Eternal Notre-Dame’ experience itself, Orange says visitors will be able to enjoy the virtual tour until the end of 2024, to overlap with the Olympic games in Paris. Orange is also making the virtual experience available for customers around the world via Meta Quest’s App Lab and the Pico VR store; as before, all proceeds will go towards the cathedral’s restoration.

Furthermore, Bouchet explained that the project’s success has led them to begin engaging with other telcos and customers around the world with whom they could develop similar VR experiences.

“We’re currently in discussion with other countries in the world – in Asia and North America – to deliver similar experiences outside of France. We will look to licence the physical version of the VR experience to others if they want to offer the same kind of experience to their customers,” he explained.

Asked what Orange’s individual plans were for XR moving forward, Bouchet said that the company’s next project would also focus on Notre-Dame in the form of a 5G augmented reality experience for the social media app Snapchat.

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VIEWPOINT

At the 20th Huawei Global Analyst Summit (HAS), the annual Huawei Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) Session was held successfully. Industry analysts, KOLs and media from the world participated the session to witness the latest industry progress of Autonomous Networks (AN) and Huawei ADN updates.

Through the session, audiences gained in-depth knowledge of Huawei’s business advancements and strategic direction within the AN industry. River He, the CTO of Huawei General Development Dept, presented a “three initiatives” approach of achieving AN L4 and shared the outlook of Huawei ADN.

HAS Autonomous Driving Network session

In the era of 5.5G, networks must improve by 10 times in performance and intelligence. Achieving AN L4 by 2025 is one of the core objectives of Huawei’s strategic vision for 5.5G era. By evolving the network from L3 to L4, CSPs will definitely achieve 10 times increase for network O&M efficiency.

River said, “We will continue to increase investment and build our ADN solution featuring full-stack AI at the network element (NE), network, and service layers, which is adhered to the three basic principles — native intelligence, single-domain autonomy, and cross-domain collaboration. Furthermore, we encourage the ICT industry to collaborate in the following three key aspects: defining level characteristics, developing standards for intent APIs, and scenario-based implementation. By doing so, we can accelerate the growth and development of our industry.”

River Huang, CTO of General Development Dept, Huawei

Accelerating the level characteristics definitions of L4/L5: The ICT industry should collaboratively establish the target profile of AN L4/L5, clarifying the level characteristics and effectiveness indicators for each scenario to enhance product and solution capabilities.
Accelerating the standardization of intent APIs: To convert the capability improvements into business achievements and augment NaaS capabilities, the communications industry must develop standardized, large granularity intent APIs based on business value and service requirements.
Accelerating the AN implementation in business scenarios: The ICT industry should reinforce cooperation between CSPs and vendors, focusing on business scenarios and value to facilitate large-scale deployment of L3 AN, thereby laying a solid foundation for achieving L4 by 2025.

As one of the initiators and practitioners of AN, Huawei and its partners have continuously carried out AN practices over the past three years and achieved remarkable results in improving quality and revenue, O&M efficiency, and energy saving for our customers. For example, the Poor-QoE rate of home broadband users has reached 83%; the average recovery time for each fault is shortened by more than 30 minutes, and the average energy saving of a single base station exceeds 10%. Autonomous network is a long journey. Huawei will continue to cooperate with leading partners around the world, deeply integrate digital technologies with application scenarios, and jointly create value for various industries and accelerate the development of L4 autonomous networks.

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Press Release

The IMDEA Networks Institute, in collaboration with Telefónica, NEC Corporation and BluSpecs, is proud to announce the launch of the ENABLE-6G project. This ambitious initiative aims to address the challenges that will be faced by future 6G networks, such as increased connectivity, higher performance demands, and advanced object and environment detection and communication.This project is funded by the European Union-NextGenerationEU and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, in the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).

As 5G technology continues to be the driving force behind edge computing and autonomous vehicles, researchers and industry experts are already looking towards the future and the development of 6G technology. With challenges in capacity, energy efficiency, latency, and data security and privacy, the development of the ENABLE-6G project has become crucial. It’s necessary for 6G networks to become more adaptable and intelligent to enable the realization of a future vision that will contend with greater levels of complexity, contextualization, and data traffic while consuming less energy and offering stronger security and privacy measures. Such advancements are crucial to instil the necessary level of trust required for widespread implementation of next-generation devices and nodes.

One of the main objectives is to ensure advanced privacy protections are built into the architecture, as precise mapping and sensing, data privacy and security have become major concerns, and has also become a major benefit for new use cases. Another strategic objective is the design and implementation of software-defined networks that can operationalise optimized edge-to-cloud
processing to facilitate time-critical and geo-distributed network orchestration (e.g., via the application of control-task algorithms). The ENABLE-6G project represents a major step forward in the
new technologies into 6G to improve wireless communications, provide environmental sensing and significantly reduce the energy footprint per device to avoid a large overall increase in network power consumption. We are excited about the potential impact of this project and look forward to collaborating with our partners to bring it to fruition.

Telefónica is one of the leading private R&D centers in Spain, aiming to explore and develop new technologies and solutions that can improve the company’s existing products and services, as well as identify and create new business opportunities in the telecommunications and technology sectors. One of the big companies joining this project is NEC Corporation, with a great capacity has a strong commitment to research and development and invests heavily in new technologies and innovative solutions. ENABLE-6G counts on the excellent IMDEA Networks scientists, one of the best innovation and development centres in Spain, with a variety of experts from all over the world. Finally, this project will count on the consultancy of BluSpecs, facilitating the digital transformation of private and public organisations through the application of knowledge, data, and methodologies in the field of strategy, implementation of new technologies and innovation.

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News

According to figures from Ofcom, only 220,000 households are taking advantage of social tariffs, despite over four million homes being eligible for the discounts

With the cost-of-living crisis continuing to strike the most vulnerable people in the UK the hardest, Ofcom is this week once again calling on operators to do more to promote their discounted service offers, known as social tariffs.

For years now, the regulator has been pushing providers to offer more low-cost connectivity packages to households receiving state benefits. In fact, these efforts have been largely successful, with many broadband providers, including major players like BT, Virgin Media O2, Vodafone, and Sky, now offering discounted packages to customers claiming Universal Credit and other benefits.

Take-up of these offers, however, remains low. Last year, research from Ofcom showed that 4.2 million households in the UK were eligible to participate in social tariff offers, but only 55,000 (1.2%) homes were signed up to these packages.

Much of the issue here is visibility, with social tariffs typically being poorly advertised and misunderstood. According to Ofcom’s 2022 study, 84% of benefits recipients did not know they were eligible for social tariffs, despite over 1.1 million homes claiming to struggle with connectivity bills.

Now, more than one year on since this study was released, and Ofcom’s latest figures are beginning to show progress but only on a small scale. Compared to 2022, uptake has increased roughly four-fold, rising to 220,000 homes across the UK.

However, this figure still represents just a tiny fraction – 5.1% – of the 4.3 million households that are eligible to participate in these deals.

“We’re urging anyone who thinks they could be eligible for a discount deal to contact their provider today and potentially save hundreds of pounds. Providers should also do much more to help these customers find and access these deals, at a time when these savings could make a massive difference,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s director for network and communications.

While welcoming the increase in people taking advantage of social tariffs, Ofcom continued to be critical of providers’ efforts to inform customers that these deals were available.

Of those households that were aware of social tariffs, 26% said they had learned about them from social media and 21% from watching television.

Just 9% said they had been informed about them from their broadband provider.

In total, 53% of eligible households were still unaware of social tariffs as of February 2023.

Are operators doing enough to support vulnerable customers during the cost-of-living crisis? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s Connected Britain

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