In our previous blog post, we noted the surging interest in metaverse technology, spurred in large part by the recent Facebook/Meta corporate repositioning. It caused quite a stir in the media to say the least, and not just in the close confines of Silicon Valley. The “metaverse” has become a household word almost overnight.
But the idea isn’t altogether new. The metaverse concept was coined in 1992 in a fictional novel (Snow Crash) but gained growing attention in the businesses and technology domains beginning around 2018. Early metaverse proponents commonly cite theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball’s essay series, the Metaverse Primer, when describing the overarching metaverse framework.
So what is the metaverse, exactly? Here’s how Ball defines it:
“It is the successor to the mobile internet that has defined the last two decades. The metaverse is a persistent, 3D, virtual world—a network of interconnected experiences and devices, tools and infrastructure, far beyond mere virtual reality…it can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”
If this sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it isn’t. As we previously noted, the metaverse is where all of our revolutionary new technologies will intersect. Cloud, edge, 5G, AI and IoT sensors will culminate in a fully immersive, shared virtual space where we’ll congregate for entertainment, gaming, and social engagement, as well as commercial and industrial applications.
REALITY CHECK
With all of the breathless media coverage surrounding the metaverse, we’re left to wonder: Is the metaverse just another technology buzzword? Yes and no. Early attempts to define the metaverse concept will undoubtedly get a few things wrong, and this will likely create some confusion and perhaps some cynicism in the months ahead. And to be clear, major advancements in our cloud/network infrastructure will need to occur before the metaverse is achieved in a meaningful way.
But major progress is already being made. Consider the imminent rollout of 5G by AT&T and Verizon, and then recall that 5G was itself considered a buzzword just a few short years ago. The phased, global 5G rollout has also been hugely instructive in designing futureproofed networks optimized for even greater scalability as capacity needs increase. And they will increase.
Some would argue that the first instantiations of the metaverse have already arrived, manifesting in hugely popular virtual gaming/entertainment platforms like Roblox, Fortnite and Animal Crossing. So the metaverse is closer at hand than some may think, but there’s consensus agreement in the technology community that there’s still miles to go.
So how does ultra wideband technology factor into the metaverse?
We plan to address this topic in an expanded blog post series. By way of simple explanation, we can look at it like this:
The super-charged network infrastructure delivering the extremely high data throughput powering our ultra-low latency metaverse experiences of the future will extend only as far as our wires and cables will carry them.
At the end of that journey, all of that data must ultimately be transmitted wirelessly to our personal area networks (PANs) where our wearable hardware peripherals will distribute the data in ways that fully immerse our sense of sight, sound, and touch.
The quality of the metaverse experience hinges completely on the quality of the communications. And where Bluetooth has already hit its technology limitations for present day applications, UWB stands alone as the short-range wireless technology that can deliver the extreme data throughput and ultra-low latency required for the metaverse experiences of tomorrow.
SPARK Microsystems takes this value proposition another step further by ensuring that the power consumption profile for the aforementioned wireless peripherals – from headset to fingertip – will allow for lengthy usage times between battery charges. This means fewer interruptions for more seamless immersion in the metaverse.
The full promise of the metaverse is somewhat off on the horizon, but it will be well worth the wait. In the meantime, SPARK Microsystems is wasting no time in supercharging our present-day audio, gaming and AR/VR/XR applications with UWB as we collectively take the next steps toward the metaverse.
Image Source: Pixabay
2021 was a pivotal year for UWB technology – the year that UWB wireless connectivity broke through to the mainstream commercial domain with the emergence of products like Apple’s AirTags and Tile’s Ultra UWB-powered devices for everyday positioning and location applications. UWB was also a hot topic in the automotive community, likewise for UWB’s precision positioning capability, applied for secure keyless entry apps.
But the biggest UWB trends in 2021 have rippled far beyond positioning and location apps, and we’ve seen this firsthand at SPARK Microsystems’ own blog, where we’ve tallied our top three most visited/read blog posts of the year.
It’s probably no surprise that our blog post on UWB for high-quality audio was featured reading among site visitors. Wireless ear buds and earphones are ubiquitous in our lives – we wear them often and we wear them everywhere. And we’re tired of them sounding like cheap tin cans!
The audio market is primed for UWB mainly because there’s such an immediate and widespread pent-up demand for high-quality wireless audio. It’s also a natural jumping off point for the numerous other rich media apps that could be dramatically improved with high-throughput short-range wireless connectivity speed that far exceeds Bluetooth.
Earlier this year when UWB grabbed the world’s attention in consumer positioning/location apps, it’s as if market watchers everywhere pricked up their ears all at once and asked their search engines: What else is UWB good for?
For many of them it was an eye-opening moment, and our blog post on the benefits of UWB for high-speed data and multimedia comms apps helped answer their questions. Positioning is a great application for UWB but it doesn’t take advantage of UWB’s energy efficiency attributes and therefore only scratches the surface of UWB’s full potential.
Atop our list of the most visited/read blog posts of 2021 was a blog post that provided a literal look ahead to the future of UWB technology. Wearers of Facebook and Ray-Ban’s “Stories” smart glasses were provided a small glimpse of AR/VR’s potential.
What did they see? The metaverse looming large on the horizon.
Facebook itself rebranded as Meta just a month later in an attempt to harness some early metaverse mojo. But the metaverse extends well beyond the scale and scope of anything Meta – or any vendor – could ever undertake on its own.
The metaverse is where all of our revolutionary new technologies will converge. Cloud, edge, 5G, AI and IoT sensors – and in particular our UWB-powered personal area network (PAN) technology – will culminate in a fully immersive, shared virtual space that we’ll flock to for entertainment, gaming, social engagement and even commercial and industrial applications.
UWB is envisioned by many to emerge as the short-range wireless conduit that connects our XR goggles and peripherals to our high-speed network infrastructure, essentially acting as our physical ‘browsers’ to the metaverse. Ultra-high-speed data communication and extreme low latency and power efficiency are essential for these wireless devices, and UWB answers this need head on.
As we close out 2021, the team at SPARK Microsystems would like to thank our readers, colleagues, customers, partners and well-wishers for a hugely successful year! 2022 promises to be even better.
Picture credit: Canva
Well it’s that time of year again. The holidays are fast approaching, and your humble UWB engineer is, ahem, “multitasking” between meetings and trying to get some holiday shopping done. Let’s look over their shoulder and get inside their mind a bit, shall we? This could be fun!
You peruse your family’s wish lists slowly with a sense of apprehension, because you already know what’s coming. Electronic gadgets atop every list, each designed to wirelessly immerse them in entertainment and rich media at the speed of Bluetooth.
Which isn’t very fast. And that’s the whole problem.
You – the humble UWB engineer!* – know that the next generation of wireless gadgets will be much, much better than what’s available today. You want to make the family happy and abide by their wish listed desires, but at the same time you’re not really psyched about investing in a bunch of turn-of-the-century Bluetooth-based devices. Not with UWB technology knocking on the door.
WISH LIST ITEM #1 – HIGH-QUALITY AUDIO
And sure enough, there they are: wireless earbuds on almost every wish list. Earbuds are basically indispensable these days, and your family seems to churn through them. Some of these family members are old enough to remember how incredible music sounded before it was compressed for lossy Bluetooth wireless transmission. They knowingly settle for less now sound-wise, and they’re counting in part on your wireless design acumen to make things right again with UWB connectivity that delivers extremely fast data rates and throughout. No compression required.
The younger ones are just starting to get into music, and you’re tickled to see a couple of them have vinyl records on their lists. Don’t worry, kids, great music experiences aren’t just a thing of the past…
Wait, did somebody really put wired headphones on their wish list? Surely they can’t be serious. You take a closer look. Yeah, it’s your brother’s list, and he’s 100% messing with you. You’re going to give him coal.
In any case, you commit to Bluetooth earbuds for now because everyone needs them. And for once the family agrees on something.
Uncle Walt has wireless speakers on his wish list. Here again, you lament the tradeoffs of Bluetooth wireless sound quality, when UWB enabled wireless speakers will be infinitely better. And with Uncle Walt you’re not just committing to getting him speakers; you’re also committing to an hours long visit to his house to help set them up. There’s basically no chance that’s he’s going to figure out the optimal positioning and layout for those things on his own. But he knows you can!
UWB will basically automate this process, enabling ‘self-aware’ wireless speakers that make set up and positioning easy, right out of the box. Uncle Walt will have to wait just a little longer.
WISH LIST ITEM #2 – EXTREME LOW LATENCY GAMING
Now for the gamers in the family, and in particular Chris. Chris is a fanatical gamer, and you get the sense that she’s heard a thing or two about the benefits of UWB wireless for gamers based on the questions she’s asked you. How much will it cut her latency? So much. Will she notice the performance difference? For sure. What’s the audio experience like? Way better.
Chris was ecstatic when you told her that 2K Hz and even 4K Hz wireless mice could be achieved with UWB connectivity. You thought she’d appreciate the insider tip and maybe take it easy on you next game. But she did not. And you couldn’t help but notice the other family members inconspicuously trickling out of the room during your riveting conversation about Hz polling rates and hard over clocking.
Anyway, Chris will be watching you closely when the gifts are unwrapped. She’s been telling her gamer friends about UWB for months now. And she’s intent on crushing every last one of them when her new UWB headset and keyboard arrive.
WISH LIST ITEM #3 – AR/VR GOGGLES AND GLASSES FOR THE METAVERSE
Farther down the wish lists…looks like someone is asking for a VR headset. You allow yourself a moment to fantasize about what AR/VR/XR devices could be like if only they were powered with UWB instead of Bluetooth. In the meantime, there’s no way you’re blowing hundreds of bucks on a set of “VR” goggles that are just going to collect dust when the promised ‘fully immersive’ experience isn’t even remotely as advertised. Not with Bluetooth it isn’t. It can’t be.
If we’ve learned anything from all the recent talk about ‘the metaverse,’ it’s that the XR devices comprising our personal area networks (PAN) in the metaverse era will require wireless connectivity with extremely high data throughput, ultra-low latency and breakthrough energy efficiency to extend device battery life between recharges. These attributes are key to the metaverse, where real-time virtual responsiveness is paramount.
…And speaking of keys, everyone’s always losing them! This one’s a no brainer and you’re gifting UWB-enabled positioning tags for your entire family to strap to their car keys. Mainly so they’ll finally stop calling you when they wind up stranded somewhere.
And partly because you’ve totally been there yourself. Better get an extra set.
* Your actual job title is Wireless Product Designer, but your family can never remember anything, so they tell people you’re a “UWB engineer” currently because you’re knee-deep in UWB-based designs and it’s pretty much all you talk about lately.
SPARK Microsystems has been making headlines again in recent weeks, and we appreciate the positive response from our customers, fans and followers!
From our headquarters in North America, we announced a new sales and support network for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) markets, comprised of both local European SPARK Microsystems sales and technical support resources, as well as manufacturers’ representatives in each region. And we announced two distributor partnerships in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. SPARK Microsystems will be represented by Skysoon in China and Edom in Taiwan, Greater China, India, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia.
Why here and why now? SPARK Microsystems is committed to ensuring a strong sales and support presence for our customers in every high-value market. But interest in UWB wireless technology is surging in these two regions in particular, and it’s easy to see why: they’re the gateways to massive commercial markets where UWB’s potential can be unleashed at massive scale.
While we can’t disclose the details of our customer engagements just yet, our conversations with them tend to revolve around topics of particular interest to the cluster of powerhouse technology vendors residing in their backyards.
EMEA is of course home to many of the world’s biggest industrial and automotive suppliers, where the respective UWB opportunities in IoT/IIoT sensors and keyless vehicle entry loom large. Real-time locating systems (RTLS) remain a major area of focus for UWB enablement in EMEA, and likewise, UWB is striking a chord among audio engineers in the region targeting wireless earphones, speakers, ‘surround sound’ technologies and other apps where premium sound is a major selling point.
And if you ever want to see an industrial designer really get excited, there’s an industry conversation happening right now about how ultra-low-power UWB opens the door to wireless, battery-less sensors powered by nothing more than ambient indoor light, or even vibration or body heat. UWB is truly revolutionary technology, and its ripple effect for advanced sensor technologies will likewise be game-changing.
In the APAC region, SPARK Microsystems has arrived at a pivotal moment in the hotly competitive consumer electronics market, where major innovation in gaming, audio, and positioning technology is converging for next-generation AR/VR/MR technology – and onward to XR applications in the metaverse of tomorrow. UWB is a key enabling technology for these apps, delivering high-speed data throughput that Bluetooth can’t, with orders of magnitude lower latency and power consumption for ultra-responsive devices built for extended usage between battery charges.
Bluetooth has served us well enough for consumer electronics devices and personal area network (PAN) apps during its decades-long dominion, but Bluetooth wasn’t conceived with XR applications in mind. It allowed us to ‘cut the cord’ for the first time, for which we’re thankful, but it cost us dearly in audio/multimedia quality. With UWB, our short-range comms can finally be delivered at high speed, uncompressed – with no wires needed – and this is essential to XR’s future.
How big is the XR opportunity in Asia? According to some experts, the Asia Pacific XR market will grow by 49% over 2020-2026 with a total addressable market cap of $288.2 billion within the APAC region alone.
We’ll keep you well apprised of SPARK Microsystems’ strategic initiatives in EMEA, APAC and elsewhere in the months ahead as UWB innovation and adoption continues to accelerate around the globe. Anywhere PANs can be supercharged and/or IoT sensors could run on almost no charge at all, SPARK UWB can help make it happen.
For more information on our global distributors & sales representatives network, feel free to visit our Contact Us page
Image source: Pixabay
In the ongoing ‘Story of Ultra-Wideband’ as told through the (virtual) pages of SemiWiki, we’ve traced the foundational shifts in UWB’s evolutionary path over 100 years of innovation. Impulse radio, the precursor of UWB, debuted as a distress signal for the R.M.S. Titanic, portending challenging currents. A century later, the world’s largest technology powerhouses together are pouring billions of dollars into UWB technology.
For the most recent – but by no means final – chapter in the story, we invite you to read Part 6 of the Story of Ultra-Wideband, where UWB’s ‘killer apps’ are revealed in full.
There’s been drama, intrigue and suspense along the way, a comeback story with a thrilling climax. UWB has been on an odyssey to market ubiquity, with lots of twists and turns. It’s truly a technology story for the ages.
The team at SPARK Microsystems is honored to have played a key role in authoring the story of UWB – figuratively and literally – and we’re grateful to the team at SemiWiki for giving us this opportunity. As the history of UWB continues to unfold, we’ll continue chronicling its many milestones and chapters.
Watch this space while we make history.
In previous blog posts we’ve highlighted some of the hot applications targeted with ultra-wideband (UWB) short-range wireless connectivity – wireless audio earphones, gaming headsets, AR/VR devices, smart glasses, positioning and tracking, to name a few.
What do all of these devices have in common? They’re all core enabling technologies for Extended Reality (XR), a superset of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR).
These technologies point to a future where XR is ubiquitous in our lives, which explains why our top innovators are pushing so hard at cracking the code that finally unlocks XR for mass commercial consumption. Analysts have projected that XR could deliver a $1.5 trillion boost to the global economy by 2030, observing that “XR technology can benefit virtually all industries.”
XR is big business built atop breakthrough technology, intended to harness all of our senses to deliver ultra-immersive experiences like we’ve never experienced before. Fully realized, XR incorporates our sensory abilities for touch, sight and sound. All three senses must be accounted for, but for the purpose of this blog, we’d like to deep dive on the topic of sound.
Audio quality and clarity is of course a paramount concern when it comes to XR, and UWB is orders of magnitude better performing than Bluetooth since there’s no need to compress the audio signal with UWB. For sound quality, UWB is vastly superior to Bluetooth because it enables 10X more data throughput.
But there’s another crucial advantage that UWB brings to the table when it comes to audio, and it’s massively important to the future of XR: spatial audio.
We’ve been hearing more and more about spatial audio in one form or another in recent years, and it means different things to different people depending on the application.
For movie and TV entertainment, spatial audio has largely manifested as ‘surround sound’ techniques that bring dynamic depth – and height – to the soundscape for a more lifelike audio experience. It’s an approach used in film sound mixing in recent years, perhaps most notably with Dolby Atmos, which in turn has been licensed for use in Apple’s debut spatial audio offering.
In the world of gaming, spatial audio allows gamers to pinpoint enemies and other game elements from all sides and react to them faster. Spatial audio can vastly improve gameplay performance by ensuring that crucial, positional audio cues are readily perceptible.
For music listeners, the benefits of spatial audio-equipped earphones are like the difference between 2D and 3D video in that it adds an entirely new dimension. You really need to hear it for yourself to fully grasp the transformation. Rather than being limited to discrete channels – like a left and right channel, as with stereo – sound is projected and moved around a 3D audio space. It’s simulating more depth and width within the sound mix for musicians and sound engineers to work their magic.
For AR/VR devices and smart glasses, spatial audio can be used to make virtual objects sound like they’re right next to us in the real world, with implications for a wide range of assistive applications. The specific location of the sound provides hugely valuable guidance in the form of prompts and cues that guide us on our way and/or alert us to objects and activities around us.
For all of these applications – aside from the entertainment value – audio is essential to establishing spatial positioning, relative orientation and other cues. It plays a major part in helping users establish situational awareness, and that’s precisely why it’s so important to XR applications going forward. We can’t freely move about in the virtual environments of the future in an informed way if we can’t sense depth in every direction. Spatial audio gives us this ability.
SPARK’s UWB technology enables the extreme data throughput that’s perfect to not only stream high quality, uncompressed audio but also stream inertial measurement unit (IMU) data at low latency to allow these spatial audio algorithms to work their magic. Because this rich sensor data can now be transmitted at such low latency with UWB, this could also shift the processing burden from the earphones to the source/dongle, opening the door to increased power savings for wireless earphones going forward. This approach could also accommodate more complex algorithms running on the source/dongle, enabling much longer usage between recharges and even better spatialization.
Credit picture: Pixabay
The slow but steady evolution of AR/VR technology has made for some attention-grabbing headlines over the years. From ‘smart glasses’ to full AR/VR headsets, much progress has been made in advancing this technology forward to mainstream commercialization – with much fanfare.
Witness the recently announced collaboration between Facebook and EssilorLuxottica, and the launch of their Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. It’s yet another milestone in the long and painstaking maturation of AR/VR technology, and a reminder of how far we’ve come as an industry since AR/VR’s infancy.
It’s also a reminder of how far we have yet to go.
Facebook itself has taken pains to set consumer expectations appropriately, carefully delineating what Ray-Ban Stories can and can’t do effectively today. They’re primarily designed for apps that can leverage the device’s integrated camera, microphone and earphone speakers. But they do not support AR or VR functionality by any stretch of the imagination – there’s no heads-up display capability, for example – and they won’t be confused with Facebook’s Oculus AR/VR headsets anytime soon.
And that’s a good thing. Indeed, the highest compliment paid to Ray-Ban Stories in many media product reviews is that the Ray-Ban Stories…actually look like regular glasses. That may seem like a trivial achievement at first, but this is in fact a major step forward in the smart/AR/VR eyewear development curve. It’s a major feat just to cram all this technology into a stylish, standard-sized eyeglasses frame!
Compounding this challenge, each new device feature introduces a corresponding tax on device battery life – a consideration that must be weighed carefully when specifying/designing the feature set and power supply for any compact, portable device. The battery within Ray-Ban Stories is said to provide a day’s worth of battery life. But as with all portable devices, the mileage may vary depending on the type of apps you’re using. If you’re using your Ray-Ban Stories for continuous audio streaming, for example, the expected battery life is closer to three hours.
Ray-Ban Stories, like Snap Inc’s Spectacles, are the latest and greatest market entries in a product category largely pioneered by Google with its Google Glass smart glasses, introduced almost a decade ago. It was a short-lived product initiative/experiment to say the least, but the industry learned many important lessons from it. And that was probably the goal.
It’s universally acknowledged that the achievement of true AR/VR technology isn’t exactly right around the corner. It will remain a promise that’s largely unfulfilled until all the supporting technologies come together to enable it.
Among other things, achieving AR/VR technology will require a huge leap forward in CPU/GPU processing efficiency in order to effectively harness and administer huge volumes of continuous, HD-resolution video and gaming content in real time. Sophisticated sensor fusion techniques must also be further developed in order to orchestrate the data flows to and from our eyes, ears and fingertips. This sensor/processor profile, in turn, requires a careful approach to power and thermal dissipation, with downstream implications for system size, etc.
AR/VR hardware will also require ultra-high-bandwidth, low latency wireless communication that’s bidirectional between user and device(s) – a capability that’s lightyears beyond what’s possible with Bluetooth wireless connectivity today. AR/VR glasses and headsets will also need to be extremely energy efficient if they’re to be used for extended periods between battery charges. Notably, if their form factor is to remain appealing for continuous usage, as opposed to current bulky AR/VR devices on the market, very stringent battery size limitations will exacerbate the need for an energy efficient system, spanning display, communication, processing functions and more.
It’s these latter performance metrics where UWB – and SPARK in particular – are ideally positioned to excel within the next generation of smart/AR/VR eyewear and peripherals. The 10X gains in data throughput that UWB provides relative to Bluetooth will no doubt prove to be a major asset for future AR/VR hardware development initiatives. The 60X reduction in latency and 40X improvement in energy efficiency that SPARK UWB transceivers provide to this end are what make them so exceptionally attractive to the AR/VR market going forward.
Rest assured, in the incremental evolution to true AR/VR technology, there will be many more product introductions like Google Glass, Snap Inc’s Spectacles and Ray-Ban Stories in the years ahead. But these products will only hint at the full potential of what can be achieved in the AR/VR technology domain of the future. And as a result, products like these will likely come and go fairly quickly – and fairly often – until AR/VR technology is finally, fully realized.
But by no means should these products be considered failures. The race to achieving AR/VR technology is a marathon, not a sprint. Industry titans like Google and Facebook recognize that AR/VR is the holy grail for media and gaming entertainment for its anticipated ability to fully immerse us in endlessly customizable digital content.
The spoils that await the market victors are beyond tantalizing, and they won’t rest until they get there. UWB will no doubt play a key enabling role along the way, and SPARK will do our part to help bring augmented reality and virtual reality technology into actual reality.
You don’t have to be an audiophile to be disappointed in the sound quality of your wireless earphones or earbuds.
If you haven’t done it lately – or perhaps you’ve never tried it at all – strap a pair of any modern mainstream wired headphones to your ears and then compare that sound experience with pretty much any Bluetooth wireless earbuds/earphones available today, even the premium variety. Regardless of the sound source, the wired headphone sound quality is noticeably superior and it’s not even close.
We as consumers made a major compromise many years ago with the arrival of Bluetooth-connected wireless earphones. By and large we were willing to look past the obvious shortcomings in audio quality because we were – for the very first time! – free to listen to music and other audio entertainment utterly unencumbered by wires. No longer physically tethered to a sound source, we were finally free to enjoy music on the go. It was a new level of entertainment mobility.
This was the state of the art in 1999, at the turn of the century. The RF technology innovations we’ve achieved since then are staggering in their ambition and scope, giving us the ability to connect with almost any person or device anywhere in the world in an instant.
And yet we still can’t beam great sounding music to our ears without wires?
Our appetite for high-quality audio hasn’t ebbed an inch since the dawn of Bluetooth – it’s only grown stronger. Witness the skyrocketing popularity of vinyl records, for example, and what that says about our pent-up demand for richer, more detailed music experiences that go well beyond the thin, digitally compressed audio we’ve been forced to get by on.
And this isn’t just nostalgia for some bygone era – the majority of the record-buying public is comprised of millennials who never experienced vinyl in its heyday – they just intuitively know they’ve been missing out on great sounding music.
This also speaks to our desire for more feature-length listening experiences that command our full attention, delivered the way our favorite music artists intended them to be heard. This trend has manifested with major online streaming services as well, where customers can now choose premium, high-resolution music delivery services available in lossless and even master formats – like you were right there in the recording booth.
Apple is watching these trends closely as well, and recently launched a high-fidelity music service available with Apple Music. It includes options for lossless (24-bit/48 kHz, or CD quality), and high-resolution lossless (192 kHz) audio quality…with one important caveat, as noted by the team at Apple Insider: “All users can enjoy lossless music without additional hardware, but the connected headphones or speakers must support lossless playback.”
Bluetooth wireless technology is inherently inadequate for delivering rich sounding, high quality music and audio. It’s limited to a very narrow bandwidth, so audio data compression must be applied in order to squeeze an otherwise bulky audio signal through a narrow pipe, degrading the signal. Bluetooth codecs are ‘lossy’ in that a lot of source audio data is stripped away – whereas CD-quality audio is achieved with a 1,411 kbps (kilobits-per-second) data rate, a Bluetooth codec renders that down to about 300 kbps.
UWB enables 10X more data throughput than BLE, and as a result, there’s no need to compress the audio signal for wireless delivery to our UWB earphones or earbuds. In other words, we can finally have wired-like sound quality without any of the wires.
If you think hardcore gamers are enthusiastic about UWB, music fans of all stripes are beside themselves at the prospect of experiencing pristine, immersive sound quality, delivered wirelessly. We’ve never had this before.
Whether you’re a superfan who lives and breathes music, or maybe you just need that full audio rush to propel you like adrenaline for that last mile or hill while you’re out jogging – we’ve been waiting for something better and it’s finally here.
This in itself is cause for genuine celebration, but the benefits don’t stop here. The new generation of high-performance UWB headsets powered by SPARK transceivers will be as much as 5 to 10X more power efficient that Bluetooth wireless earphones/earbuds. So we’ll get significantly better sound quality and significantly longer battery life.
There’s even more to look forward to. In a subsequent blog post, we’ll address other areas where UWB-enabled wireless earphones/earbuds will outperform what’s possible with Bluetooth today.
With the mass commercialization of UWB technology now underway and consumer interest riding high, it’s hard to imagine how UWB struggled to take hold in the market for so long. As chronicled right here on our blog, the technology has been with us since the late 1800s in one form or another, but it didn’t find it’s foothold until well over a century later in recent product introductions like Apple’s AirTags and perhaps others soon to be announced. Along the way, UWB technology has experienced many twists and turns.
In the 2000s when UWB spectrum was allocated internationally, telcos briefly eyed UWB as a means to cram more carrier channels into our wireless airwaves to expand available bandwidth – a complex and expensive proposition that failed. Consumer electronics makers later attempted to leverage UWB to wirelessly transfer video between laptops, cable boxes and TVs in a failed effort hyped by some as ‘Wireless HDMI.’ A similar initiative known as ‘Wireless USB’ showed promise for a time, before it too fizzled in the market.
What happened? UWB’s range and speed capabilities didn’t immediately live up to the market hype, and WiFi emerged with a faster communication implementation and consequently dominated the market for short-range wireless applications serviced with wall plug access to essentially unlimited power. For apps requiring very high data rates for heavy-duty wireless communication, WiFi remains the technology to beat for devices that don’t rely on batteries.
Bluetooth wireless connectivity likewise emerged at the turn of the century for short range comms and today it’s nearly ubiquitous – virtually unchallenged in the battery-powered wireless device market, spanning smartphones/tablets, earphones/headsets, gaming peripherals and more. For wireless apps that could get by with highly compressed audio signals and high latency (compressed video was a nonstarter), Bluetooth could deliver a lower quality but acceptable user experience for many wireless apps.
All the while, the UWB spectrum remained available for commercial use, and it was available for free! With no licensing fees to contend with, surely UWB could be put to good use by some enterprising technology vendors. But how?
SHORT-RANGE LOCATION SENSING
Harkening to the earliest days of UWB’s development, a handful of vendors decided to leverage UWB spectrum for delivering electromagnetic impulses, and impulses are perfect for radar-esque applications like positioning for object/asset tracking, as exemplified by Apple’s AirTags. In this capacity, UWB is used to measure time of flight: you send an impulse from one device, receive it on another, and measure the time it took from transmit to receive. The distance between objects can be determined based on the time it took the signal to travel, and this can be measured with picosecond accuracy with UWB chips. Leveraging onboard antennas, measurements can then be correlated to determine signal angle, and lo and behold, now we can find the precise location of our car keys! This can be achieved with accuracy down to a mere 10 centimeters – Bluetooth technology comes nowhere close to matching this precision.
But positioning technology is extremely complex and therefore extremely power hungry. As a result, UWB chips used today for object tracking are actually less power efficient than Bluetooth chips/radios by as much as 10X. So while UWB is great for positioning, it’s a gas guzzling application by nature and at the end of the day there’s no device-level power benefit delivered with UWB.
THINKING BIGGER
SPARK is unique in the UWB market in that we recognized UWB’s untapped potential for high-speed multimedia and data communications at low latency and low power. Impulses delivered over ultra-wide bandwidth ensure extremely low latency – these signals can be sent in microseconds with UWB, whereas Bluetooth would take milliseconds. This enables ultra-efficient wireless data communication. What’s more, SPARK’s UWB implementation consumes at least 10X less power than Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the lowest energy, short-range wireless connectivity technology commercially deployed today.
With SPARK UWB ICs, huge volumes of data and high-quality, uncompressed audio and multimedia can be delivered with 60X lower latency and 40X better energy efficiency than legacy Bluetooth ICs. This is hugely beneficial not only for consumer wireless applications, but also for the myriad IoT, smart city and AI applications on the horizon that will require UWB-caliber, high-speed communication among sprawling networks of battery-powered wireless sensors.
UWB is great for positioning apps, and SPARK salutes our peers in the UWB technology domain for successfully introducing UWB to the mainstream. But positioning represents a mere sliver of UWB’s potential, and the best is yet to come.
Picture credit: Pixabay
In conversations with customers, we rarely speak of UWB-enabled technology advancements in terms of incremental upgrades. The orders of magnitude performance advantages that SPARK UWB technology provides compared to legacy Bluetooth – 40X better energy efficiency, 60X lower latency – means that we can talk about customers’ design strategies in much broader strokes – as if imagining the application for the first time, or as if considering wireless technology to replace a wired application for the first time.
We’re reminded of this as we approach the Sensors Converge conference (September 21-23, San Jose, CA) where we anticipate many of these kinds of conversations. They won’t center on important but somewhat pedestrian questions like, “Can UWB sensors help shave a couple bucks off my electric bill?”
SPARK UWB sensors can do much better than that! We prefer to think in these terms: What if you could design the perfect sensor?
Without addressing whether UWB can help sensor designers achieve such ambitious design goals (spoiler alert: it can), let’s consider what that perfect sensor might look like.
The advantages of wireless sensors over hardwired sensors are immediately obvious to anyone who’s ever installed them or scrutinized the respective BOM costs. Wireless sensors are cheaper and faster to deploy, maintain and repurpose than hardwired sensors. If you aggregate this advantage and cost savings across a network of sensors – from a minor installation to a massive mesh network – the benefits are crystal clear.
As an added benefit, wireless sensor connectivity means you won’t have to drill countless destructive holes into your infrastructure to accommodate a cumbersome tangle of sensor wires, whether that infrastructure belongs to a smart city, smart port, smart factory, smart condo building, and/or everything in between.
For the next generation of sensors targeted for use in autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure – among countless other AI-guided commercial and industrial apps – sample rates of once an hour or even once a minute won’t be anywhere close to enough to satisfy AI’s insatiable data demand. These sensor systems absolutely require 24/7 ‘always on’ availability for live telemetry that ensures continuous access to the most up-to-date data available. These sensors can’t be powered down between samples to save energy – for the sensor networks of tomorrow, there is no downtime.
Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate the impending need for ‘always on’ sensor connectivity is to envision roadways filled with self-driving vehicles relying on real-time positioning and safety data from surrounding vehicles and infrastructure in order to safely traverse our cities and suburbs at high speeds. Their automated reaction times must be nearly instantaneous, and this would be impossible with sensors supporting anything less that continuous availability, data sampling and communication.
Sensors designed for ‘always on’ live telemetry can help enable near real-time monitoring, and this is critical for a wide range of apps and environments, from our highways to our assembly lines, to our municipal infrastructure and everywhere else. Real time data monitoring ensures that no data escapes our attention and can be acted upon immediately.
This will be particularly valuable for apps like automated inspection, surveillance, and object detection and recognition, with far-reaching implications affecting everything from the quality of the products outputted by our assembly lines to the security threats posed by unknown intruders and objects. For these types of applications, ‘always on’ live telemetry must be complemented with extreme low-latency communication. A smart camera, for example, may only have a split second to pinpoint and communicate a security threat amid a deluge of data points.
We saved the best for last, because this one is really important. Why can’t today’s wireless sensors maintain ‘always on’ operations with continuous data sampling and high-speed communication? It’s simply too power intensive for Bluetooth-based sensors – they can’t keep up.
The onboard Bluetooth chip consumes a needlessly disproportionate 80% of the entire sensor power budget on average today. This means that the sensor batteries must be frequently recharged or replaced, a time and resource intensive process. Or as a significant compromise, the sensor simply cannot continuously send its telemetry and needs to burst chunks of data between long time intervals, defeating the ‘always on’ paradigm. It’s for this reason that many of today’s sensor networks are still reliant on hardwired connectivity, even after all the progress we’ve made in high-performance wireless connectivity in recent decades.
SPARK UWB-based sensors can turn this energy efficiency metric on its head, ensuring that a mere 20% or less of the sensor power budget is consumed by the wireless comms chip. Depending on how you’re using your sensors, this could enable ‘set it and forget it’ sensor installations that operate for many years before a drained battery ever becomes an issue. With so little power consumed by the UWB chip, this also opens the door to a future of battery-less sensors powered by nothing more than ambient indoor light, or even body heat.
We invite customers to visit with us at Sensors Converge at booth #1013, where a SPARK expert can help you envision – and achieve – the wireless connectivity your sensors have been waiting for. To arrange a meeting in advance, contact SPARK