ARRC Seminar Series - Ian Akyildiz

Title:

Metaverse: Challenges for extended reality and hologram type communication in the next decade

Abstract:

The term "METAVERSE" (META= BEYOND) and (VERSE=UNIVERSE) originated in the science fiction novel “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson in 1992 can be regarded as the evolution of the Internet where there will be almost no separation between digital and physical. The metaverse is a network of connecting the physical and virtual world seamlessly. This will be made possible thanks to the convergence of key emerging technologies such as Extended Reality (XR) (the umbrella term for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR)) as well as Hologram Type Communication (HTC). In this talk, the XR and HTC technologies are explored and according research challenges concerning wireless communications for the next decade are presented. XR and HTC provide truly immersive experiences for a plethora of use cases. They face great challenges in transmitting high volume data with high throughput and guaranteed end-to-end latency which cannot be addressed by existing/current communication technologies. In this talk, a roadmap towards wireless ultimate XR and HTC technologies is presented. The basics, existing products and use cases of these technologies are reviewed. Upon which technical requirements and bottlenecks of realizing these technologies within wireless communication networks are identified.

Bio:

I.F. Akyildiz (Life Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen–Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981, and 1984, respectively. He is an Advisory Board member at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, since June 2020. He is also Founder and President of the Truva Inc., a consulting company based in Georgia, USA, since 1989. He is the Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the newly established of International Telecommunication Union Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies (ITU J-FET) since August 2020. He served as the Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications, the Past Chair of the Telecom Group at the ECE, and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, from 1985 to 2020. He had many international affiliations during his career and established research centers in Spain, South Africa, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Russia, India and Cyprus. Dr. Akyildiz is an IEEE Fellow since 1996, and ACM Fellow since 1997. He received numerous awards from IEEE, ACM, and other professional organizations, including Humboldt Award from Germany and Tubitak Award from Turkey. In June 2022, according to Google Scholar his h-index is 133 and the total number of citations to his articles is more than 134+K. His current research interests include Networking 2030, Metaverse, Hologram and Extended Reality Communication, 6G/7G wireless systems, Terahertz Communication, Underwater Communication.