Extremely Interactive and Low-Latency Services in 5G and Beyond Mobile Systems

This article provides an overview on extremely interactive and low-latency immersive services as well as the relevant industry and standardization activities. Immersive services immerse a viewer or the viewed digital objects into an environment that is either real, virtual, or a mixture of both. The applications are accordingly named virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, and holography applications. These applications benefit from the ongoing advances in user interfaces, computing technologies, and networking technologies. Such applications are expected to generate most of the traffic in the next generation networks, particularly 6G networks. In this article, the main relevant use cases are introduced along with their respective requirements. The article also provides insights on the relevant architectures and solutions, and highlights some research challenges and directions.