How VR and AR are reshaping internet speed needs

Step into a world where the lines between digital and physical are blurring, where your living room can become a portal to ancient Rome or your smartphone can overlay helpful information onto the world around you. This isn’t science fiction anymore – it’s the rapidly unfolding reality of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).

As these technologies become integral to daily life, understanding their implications for internet speeds is essential. From immersive gaming to real-time industrial applications, VR and AR are driving the next wave of digital transformation.

Understanding VR and AR

Before we dive too deep, let’s quickly clarify what we mean by VR and AR. While often mentioned together, they offer distinct experiences:

• Virtual Reality (VR): think complete immersion. VR transports you to an entirely digital environment, shutting out the physical world. You’ll typically wear a headset that displays a computer-generated world and often use controllers to interact with it. It’s perfect for deeply immersive gaming, realistic training simulations and virtual tourism.
• Augmented Reality (AR): AR blends the digital with the physical. Remember Pokémon Go? It overlays computer-generated information, images or objects onto your view of the real world. This is often experienced through smartphone apps, but dedicated AR glasses are becoming more common. AR is fantastic for things like navigating with overlaid directions, visualising furniture in your home before you buy it or interactive educational experiences where digital models appear in your classroom. Mixed Reality (MR) is also emerging, which takes AR a step further by allowing digital objects to interact with the physical environment in a more integrated way.

Rapid growth and adoption

While VR grabbed early attention with thrilling gaming experiences and AR became widely known through mobile hits like Pokémon Go, their applications are rapidly expanding across a multitude of sectors. In fact, the market for VR and AR is experiencing exponential growth, with reports projecting that the global VR and AR market is set to exceed $46.6 billion by 2025. Here are some sectors where the two are becoming essential tools.

Healthcare

VR is being used for surgical training, allowing aspiring surgeons to practice complex procedures in a risk-free virtual environment. It’s also proving effective in pain management and therapy, providing distractions and creating calming virtual spaces for patients. Meanwhile, AR is assisting surgeons by overlaying patient data or anatomical information during procedures.

Education

From students exploring the human body in 3D with VR and bringing historical figures to life in the classroom using AR, these technologies can make learning more engaging, interactive and certainly more memorable. AR applications like Google Expeditions provide students virtual tours of historical landmarks and exotic locations. Studies have shown impressive results, with research indicating that VR-trained learners report increased confidence and improved information retention compared to traditional methods. For example, a report by PwC highlighted that VR training can lead to a 75% improvement in information retention and around a 40% reduction in learning time.

Retail

The retail sector is embracing AR to enhance the customer experience. Customers can virtually “try on” clothes or visualise how furniture will look in their homes using AR apps on their smartphones, reducing uncertainty and potentially decreasing returns.
Manufacturing and engineering

AR is being used for guided maintenance and repairs, providing technicians with overlaid instructions and diagrams as they work on complex machinery. And VR in particular is valuable for designing and visualising products and factories in a virtual space before physical construction begins. Companies like Boeing and GE Aviation use AR glasses to guide workers through complex assembly processes in real-time.

Why internet speed matters for VR and AR

Unlike browsing a webpage or streaming a standard video, these technologies rely heavily on real-time data processing and high-resolution graphics, which in turn require substantial internet bandwidth and low latency to function seamlessly. In fact, their immersive nature comes with significant demands on network performance, particularly in three key areas – bandwidth, latency and jitter.

Bandwidth

Think of bandwidth as the width of the pipe carrying data to and from your devices, which means that the more bandwidth you have, the more data can flow at once. VR and AR experiences, especially those with high-resolution graphics and complex interactions require a lot of data.

So let’s say you’re streaming a high-definition 360-degree video in VR. To create a sense of presence and detail, the video needs to be high resolution (often 4K or even 8K) and delivered at a high frame rate to avoid motion sickness. This translates to a massive stream of data that needs to be constantly delivered to your headset. According to some studies, a high-quality, immersive VR experience can require sustained bandwidth of 100 Mbps or even higher, significantly more than what’s typically needed for standard HD video streaming.

Interactive VR, where your movements and actions in the virtual world are reflected in real-time, adds even more data as your position and interactions need to be constantly transmitted and received.

AR, while not always requiring the same level of graphical complexity as high-end VR, still demands substantial bandwidth, especially for applications that involve streaming high-resolution video of your surroundings and overlaying detailed digital content.

Latency

This refers to the delay between an action and its result. In the context of internet, it’s the time it takes for data to travel from your device to a server and back again. For traditional web browsing or email, a few hundred milliseconds of latency might be barely noticeable, however, in VR and AR, low latency is absolutely critical for a comfortable and immersive experience.

At the same time, high latency in VR can be incredibly disorienting and even cause motion sickness. If there’s a delay between when you turn your head in the real world and when your view updates in the virtual world, it creates a disconnect that can make you feel nauseous. For a truly seamless and comfortable VR experience, latency needs to be extremely low, ideally below 20 milliseconds (ms) and for some applications, even lower than 10 ms.

AR also benefits greatly from low latency, especially in interactive applications. For instance, when using an AR app to get directions overlaid on the street ahead of you. If the overlaid information lags behind your actual position, it quickly becomes unhelpful and frustrating. Real-time interaction with augmented objects also requires near-instantaneous responses, making low latency essential.

Jitter

This refers to the variation in the time delay of data packets. Even if you have low average latency, high jitter means that the delay is inconsistent, causing choppy performance and potentially breaking the immersion in VR and AR. Smooth and consistent data flow is crucial for delivering a fluid and realistic immersive experience.

The role of 5G and fibre optic

To meet the growing demands of VR and AR applications, advancements in internet infrastructure have been crucial. This is where the latest generation of network technology, 5G, plays a crucial role. Designed with the future of connectivity in mind, one of the most significant advantages of 5G is its much higher bandwidth compared to previous generations like 4G. With theoretical peak speeds reaching up to 10 Gbps or even 20 Gbps, it can handle the massive data streams required for high-resolution, high-frame-rate VR and AR content.

But it’s not just about speed. 5G also offers drastically lower latency. While 4G’s is typically in the range of 50-100 ms, 5G is designed to achieve latency as low as 1 ms in ideal conditions. This near-instantaneous communication is a game-changer for VR and AR. In addition, 5G networks are designed to provide a more uniform experience, even when many users are connected at the same time.

Take a look at this 5G guide if you would like to find out more about this technology and see how it is changing the way we use our phones. You may also want to read through these 5G myths.

On the other hand, fibre optic, such as our Giga fibre internet, provides high-speed, high-capacity internet, essential for households making use of VR and AR technologies. The symmetrical upload and download speeds of fiber ensures smooth performance for both content consumption and creation. More specifically, fibre internet, which can deliver speeds ranging from 100 Mbps up to several Gbps, effortlessly supports streaming ultra-high-definition visuals necessary for realistic and immersive VR and AR experiences. What’s more with fibre optic cables using light signals to transmit data, this connection has inherently significantly lower latency compared to copper-based broadband options.

Stable connectivity is paramount in VR and AR, however, fibre internet is less susceptible to interference, providing a more stable and consistent connection compared to traditional broadband. And lastly, fibre infrastructure is highly scalable, capable of supporting future increases in data demands as VR and AR technologies evolve toward higher resolutions, such as 8K and beyond, as well as more interactive features.

The road ahead

As VR and AR technologies continue to advance, with higher resolutions, wider fields of view and more complex interactions including haptics (the use of technology that stimulates the senses of touch and motion) and even smell, the demands on networks will continue to grow.

Future network technologies, such as 6G, are already on the horizon and are being designed with even more ambitious goals for speed, latency and capacity, while ongoing research and development in areas like advanced compression algorithms and view-dependent streaming are working to reduce the amount of data required for immersive experiences without sacrificing quality.

The rise of VR and AR is not just a technological trend but a step towards a more connected future. So get ready to explore new worlds, interact in incredible ways and experience a future that’s more connected and immersive than ever before with the right internet speed.

Sources:
AR & VR Worldwide
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