Opportunities and Challenges of Tangible XR Applications for 5G Networks and Beyond

The increasing popularity of virtual reality and augmented reality applications has unveiled the need for boosting the efforts of implementing extended reality (XR) to users. An analogous high interest from both academia and industry is being shown for tactile Internet (TI). The ever-increasing use of virtualization technologies makes the usage of haptic communication even more important in order to create robust tangible systems, but also to achieve an optimal and faster balance among the interaction modalities, as well as between humans and machines. The current wireless mobile networks cannot provide ultra-low latency, massive computational capability, and high communication bandwidth, requirements that are crucial for applications, such as XR and TI. A simplified tangible XR system is proposed accompanied with the opportunities and challenges of such an implementation.