6G technologies – Nokia Bell Labs

6G could alter every aspect of our lives. Our Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Nokia, Nishant Batra, discusses how 6G will unlock the true potential of the metaverse, connecting physical, digital and human realities.

The metaverse I’m talking about is one where the physical,
human and digital realities are conjoined. Through extended reality (XR), we can bring
the metaverse wherever we go, rather than confine it to our homes and offices. This metaverse
will embrace mobility; it will be equally at home in the consumer, enterprise and industrial
realms; and it will be built on the foundation of detailed digital twins mirroring our physical
surroundings.

This grander metaverse fits squarely with Nokia’s Tech Vision 2030, which has two main tenets.
The first is tenet is digital-physical fusion — our digital and physical lives will become
inextricably linked. The second is human augmentation. That may sound like a scary phrase to
some, but our view of augmentation isn’t one of cyborgs and prosthetics. Rather it is a world
where humans gain unprecedented insight into their health and lives and learn new ways to
manipulate the physical world through digital means.

How do we achieve this vision? We will need ecosystem-wide innovation: new devices, software and
tools; powerful computer capabilities and distributed processing; and technologies that can
sense and understand the physical world and comprehend human action and intent. Underlying all
of these technologies, however, will be the fabric of connectivity.

We have already laid the connectivity foundation with 5G, but as our networks become more
powerful in the next decade so will the power of the metaverse. We will make big strides when 5G-Advanced
networks emerge in 2025, enabling true XR experiences, but it is in the 6G
era of 2030 that the full potential of the metaverse will be realized.