Signal Atlas

Research library

Augmented reality & XR

Glasses, headsets and holographic calls that blend digital content with the real world. What 6G adds: very high data rates and low delay for holographic and immersive media.

Of 24 findings in this theme, 12 are real today, 6 designed and 6 forecast.

Real today 12

  • 5G-Advanced now handles each video frame as one unit. Since Release 18, 3GPP lets the network handle all the packets that make up one XR video frame as a group (a 'PDU set') and know when a burst of data ends. Release 19 added a way for apps to tag packets so this still works when traffic is encrypted, for example over QUIC.
  • A doctor was 'holoported' to the space station. On 8 October 2021 a NASA flight surgeon appeared as a live 3D image inside the International Space Station and talked with an astronaut wearing a mixed-reality headset. NASA sees uses in telemedicine.
  • AR glasses already push their computing off the face. Meta's 2024 Orion AR glasses prototype runs tracking on the glasses but moves app logic to a pocket-sized wireless compute puck to save weight, heat and battery. Meta's 2026 VR Glasses use the same idea with a tethered puck.
  • Brain and nerve signals as input for AR headsets. Snap bought EEG headband maker NextMind (2022) for future AR glasses, Apple added a protocol in 2025 letting brain-interface devices control iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro, and Cognixion began testing an EEG headband on Vision Pro for people who cannot speak.
  • DOCOMO streamed a live VR meet-and-greet over photonic fibre. In March 2026, NTT and DOCOMO linked an XR studio to a remote venue over the IOWN all-photonics network for a live VR fan event, with an average one-way delay of 0.04 ms. Fans also tried a simulated haptic high-five, and all 39 surveyed participants were at least somewhat satisfied.
  • Four European operators joined phones in holographic calls. In 2022, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone, with start-up MATSUKO, ran a pilot where customers of different networks shared one holographic session. A phone selfie camera's 2D video was turned into a 3D hologram in the cloud and streamed to AR or VR viewers.
  • One 5G cell serves only about twelve VR users. 3GPP's XR evaluation study simulated VR/AR streams of 30 Mbit/s at 60 frames per second that must arrive within 10 ms. In an indoor hotspot, company results ranged from about 5 to 12 satisfied users per cell, averaging around 9.
  • Operators test smart glasses on live 5G-Advanced networks. SoftBank, Ericsson and Qualcomm streamed XR to smart glasses over SoftBank's commercial 5G standalone network in Tokyo and reported about 90% lower wireless latency using L4S and related features. T-Mobile ran similar XR glasses trials in San Diego in 2025 but published no figures.
  • Phone networks are standardising avatar calls. 3GPP finished a study on avatars in real-time calls and started Release 19 work (AvCall-MED) so 2D and 3D avatars can be animated in AR calls across operators. It begins with one-to-one calls; group calls come later.
  • Standard lets glasses hand heavy graphics to the network. In Release 19, 3GPP published a split-rendering service (TS 26.567) so AR glasses can send part of the graphics work to edge or cloud servers. The goal is lighter devices with longer battery life.
  • VR can briefly make reality feel unreal. Studies the research cites, including a randomised trial and a 2023 user survey, found that virtual reality can cause mild, short-lived feelings of detachment from oneself or the surroundings.
  • XR shipments grew 44% in 2025, led by glasses. IDC says worldwide XR device shipments rose 44.4% in 2025, driven by smart glasses, while VR and mixed-reality headsets fell sharply; Meta Quest shipments dropped 42.3%.

Designed, not deployed 6

  • 6G aims at holographic and multi-sensory calls. ITU's immersive communication scenario covers immersive XR, remote multi-sensory telepresence and holographic communication, with video, sound and other data kept in sync.
  • A shared mirror world needs Earth's digital twin. The 'AR Cloud' (also called metaverse or mirror world) would be a persistent virtual layer matched one-to-one to the real world and shared by everyone, so a note left at a bus stop appears for all. Building it needs a full 3D mesh of the world, which companies were assembling from phone cameras and scans.
  • Avatars trained on behaviour could act after death. A social VR platform offered an opt-in feature that records how a user behaves so an AI avatar can imitate them, even after they die. The paper presents this as digital twins detaching from their physical owner.
  • Headsets need under 20 ms from head-turn to image. 3GPP's XR report sets 20 milliseconds as the upper limit between moving your head and seeing the updated image. If the network did all the rendering, each direction would need well under 10 ms and a steady 0.1 to 1 Gbit/s.
  • High-end holograms tied to future sub-THz bands. Ericsson links professional high-resolution holographic communication to very high frequency (sub-terahertz) bands that may come in later 6G releases, and expects wide-area mixed reality for the mass market.
  • UN telecom agency drafted 52 metaverse standards documents. An ITU-T focus group set up in late 2022 produced 52 deliverables on the metaverse, covering definitions, cross-platform interoperability, digital-twin-based metaverses, trust and sustainability. They are handed to ITU study groups that may turn them into formal standards.

Forecast 6

  • AR telepresence could place a friend beside you. Isaac Arthur expects AR glasses or contacts, not holographic watches, to deliver telepresence: AI would re-render a remote friend so they appear to walk beside you, and could add safety alerts or show CPR steps. He sees little near-term progress in true holograms.
  • Augmented reality expected to dwarf virtual reality. Market forecasts cited in 2019 expected AR to grow almost ten times bigger than VR by 2022, with hardware dominating spending and enterprise headsets used in maintenance and training. Isaac Arthur likewise sees AR, not VR, as the next-generation game-changer.
  • Display glasses forecast to outsell VR headsets by 2027. IDC forecasts XR shipments growing 33.5% in 2026 and about 26.5% a year to 2030, with glasses that have displays overtaking VR and mixed-reality headsets in volume by 2027.
  • Networks could turn headsets into light display shells. Because of cloud power and 5G bandwidth, the IEEE paper suggests future AR/VR headsets might be just a display and an antenna, with heavy rendering done remotely.
  • Remote touch is a key low-latency use case. Haptic devices let people feel touch or force, and robots can pass sensations back to a person. The IEEE papers expect low-latency networks to enable remote haptics, and a scenario imagines a parent comforting a child through virtual touch.
  • Stepping inside digital twins with AR and VR. The research expects people to use AR and VR to walk through and adjust digital twins of machines, buildings and systems in 3D.

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