Courtesy Cellnex
- La Boqueria, a famed Spanish market, participated in a 5G trial that brought AR to shoppers.
- Augmented-reality goggles were deployed to help shoppers learn about products in the market.
- Remote shoppers could also see through the AR shoppers' goggles and get a taste for the market.
- This article is part of "5G Playbook," a series exploring one of our time's most important tech innovations.
Tourists traipsing through La Boqueria, Barcelona's famed market on La Rambla, are presented with an array of amazing food and drink. But unless their Spanish is on point, they may not always know what they're looking at. That was until a trial of a new 5G-enabled tech tool offered a solution.
The technology, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and a consortium of eight companies, led by Cellnex Telecom, enabled shoppers to use an app installed on a pair of augmented-reality goggles, called Augmented Reality Personal Shopper, to see overlaid information about the provenance and production of products in market stalls.
Displaying information in real time required a 5G connection
The La Boqueria market trial, which took place in 2022, was one of the most public-facing projects pursued across the Catalonia region as part of the 5G Catalonia initiative.
"What made us enter the 5G Catalonia project was to see whether Cellnex had a way to evolve in innovation in the next few years," said José Antonio Aranda Legazpe, the product strategy and innovation director at Cellnex, which provided the 5G network.
The technology used in the trial combined computer vision, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality to understand which stall a shopper was looking at through the goggles and then overlay information about the stall's products. Look, for instance, at a vacuum-packed bag of olives, and a contextual display panel appears over the produce identifying you what the food is, where it was harvested, and how long it should last.
Alongside in-person shoppers wearing goggles, the project tested the ability for remote users to access the same information while miles away from La Boqueria, using the same augmented-reality display atop streaming video.
Courtesy Cellnex
Displaying that information in real time was possible only using the low-latency and high-bandwidth capabilities of a 5G connection, enabling edge computing — where processing systems are placed closer to where data is created — to happen as users streamed video through their goggles that was then analyzed immediately.
A 5G base station was installed in the market that transmitted the data via a fiber-optic cable to a data server near the market.
"We need edge computing because in order to respond quickly, you need to provide the session closer to where the user is," Aranda Legazpe said. In mobile data connections prior to 5G, transmitting that data could have taken 100 milliseconds. In the La Boqueria project, that was down to less than 10 milliseconds, Aranda Legazpe said.
The La Boqueria trial has concluded, but the technology worked — so technologists from Cellnex are now exploring other 5G-powered tools.
"We see an opportunity because we are in other projects investing efforts to expand the amount of sites that we have, for instance, in transport corridors," Aranda Legazpe said. Using the expertise gleaned in part from this project, Cellnex has won European project funding to cover transport corridors between Spain and France and Portugal and Spain. "This is intended to provide the telecommunications infrastructure to facilitate autonomous cars," he said.