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Beamed from space

With a new era in connectivity comes the need for powerful data, flexible platforms and global scale to meet increasing network demands and consumer expectations. If modern networks want to support immersive experiences such as extended reality (XR) and metaverse applications, they’ll need to deliver a higher level of service for coverage, bandwidth and latency. Successful planning and deployment of 5G will rely on network models that are based on detailed input geodata covering vast market territories, consisting of accurate buildings and vegetation, over urban and suburban areas in full 3D.

High-resolution 3D digital twins of Earth deliver the level of model fidelity needed to upgrade or build these networks; this level of detail was not required for previous technologies. Maxar’s satellites collect the highest resolution satellite imagery commercially available, enabling the creation of digital twins of Earth that offer the detail required to advance new and innovative applications. By unifying physical and virtual worlds with an accurate geospatial foundation, powerful simulations can reflect the current environments where we live, work and play.

Maxar’s recent exhibit at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, showcased some of our most exciting 3D products to attendees:

Explore the digital twin of Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress. See how Maxar’s Precision3D provides highly accurate visualization with precise details, and how blacksharks.ai’s SYNTH3D offers a high-performance, video-game quality representation built for metaverse applications.

3D built for virtual worlds

Tour different parts of the world through SYNTH3D in the video above.

SYNTH3D, a new digital twin developed by Maxar and blackshark.ai, enables developers and creators to jumpstart the creation of new experiences. As a geotypical 3D representation of the entire planet, SYNTH3D serves as a canvas for building next-generation video games, scouting film locations, creating virtual reality (VR) gathering places to meet friends in the metaverse, and modeling how new construction will impact traffic in a city, among other use cases.

3D built for 5G acceleration

Maxar’s Precision3D will supercharge HeavyRF, a network planning software initially built by HEAVY.AI and NVIDIA.

HeavyRF, a network planning software, enables communication service providers to determine the best antenna placement, assuring optimal signal coverage and enabling greater efficiencies in network deployments. This software, which is built with HEAVY.AI’s HeavyRF module, NVIDIA Omniverse platform and Bain & Company’s extensive domain knowledge and data-driven insights, leverages Maxar’s Precision3D geospatial data as a network digital twin. Precision3D offers highly accurate visualization with precise details and geospecific building heights and facades, enabling network planners to see built environments digitally with the same information that’s in the real world. This is one of the only software solutions that has the compute power to process the high-resolution Precision3D Telco Suite for simulating network deployments, which will enable consumers to have stable service for years to come and mitigates additional costly capital expenditure reinvestments.

3D built for augmented realities

The video above shows VPS Cities displaying augmented reality content outside the MWC event.

VPS Cities enables a visual positioning service (VPS) that allows customers to anchor XR objects and content to a corresponding real-world position. Created by Sturfee and Maxar, this service will be useful for helping digital advertisers branch into augmented reality, bringing the next-generation immersive video games to market, enabling autonomous navigation for cars and drones and more. Based on Maxar’s globally available Precision3D and Sturfee’s computer vision and artificial intelligence technology, VPS Cities offers the most scalable and economical way to generate and update VPS coverage across cities.

Take a Tiktok tour of Maxar’s booth at MWC 2023!

Although it started as a telecommunications conference many years ago, MWC has evolved into an immersive technology show. The ever-advancing wireless communications ecosystem will be a major enabler of immersive technology, both for consumers and industry, as planning, simulation and gaming use cases are developed and implemented at broad scale. Next-generation, geotypical and geospecific digital twins, such as those provided by Maxar, will be necessary to usher in this reality, making it possible to root virtual worlds and simulations in our physical reality and enable their interoperation.