The Launch Of Satellite Micius Marks The Era Of VR Gaming?

(Chinese Version)

Compared with the gold medals won in the 2016 Rio Olympics, it seems that Chinese scientists dominant success in quantum technology is more exciting.

At 1:40 August 16th 2016, China launched the world's first quantum satellite in the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China s north west, in an effort to harness the power of particle physics to build an unbreakable system of encrypted communications. The satellite makes China the leading force in quantum communication and quantum-enabled encrypted communications

Micius carries invaluable quantum technologies that have an immense impact on not only communications, but energy, finance, navigation, military, transportation, industry and agriculture as well.

Quantum-enabled

For humans, quantum technology is the key to bring about the VR era. The launched satellite Micius, from our understanding, has the following advantages:

1. High security on communications. Without electromagnetic radiation, quantum communication is impossible to be intercepted or detected by the third party. In addition to that, if the information carried in quantum communication has been changed, there will be traces.

2. High transmission speed, almost no delay. Quantum communication is almost a hundred times more efficient than the current mainstream transmission technologies in terms of information transmission. Quantum communication literally has not transmission barrier, and therefore, no information loss either.

3. High resistance to interference. Quantum communication is not affected by the medium, space or environment, showing a great resistance to interference. on equal conditions, the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) needed for quantum communication to receive information is 30—40dB lower than that of traditional communication methods.

These advantages quantum communication possesses are exactly what VR online gaming developers are looking for to boost content transmission.

Quantum transmission

VR online games require highly-efficient transmission capacity, and given the future trend, such transmission will be carried out wirelessly as well. Huawei s managing director of the board and marketing president Xu Wenwei stated: “To achieve perfect VR experience, the processing volume per second will be 5.2Gbit while the time lag should be less than 20ms.” It s quite the same for VR online videos. When a user wants to watch a 2K video with great experience, he will generally need a 4Mbp bandwidth. If the video is in 4K, then the user will need a 18Mbp bandwidth. The number will go up to 175Mbp for VR videos.

Can the current wireless network meet the requirement? At present, the 802.11AC Wi-Fi standard, the 5G Wi-Fi, is gaining traction. Theoretically, it can provide a bandwidth up to 1Gbps to realize multi-station wireless LAN communication or at least 500Mbps single wireless transmission bandwidth, far from meeting the transmission requirement of VR content, let alone the loss of information that might occur during transmission.

The reality is only the 802.11ad standard with the carrier frequency of 60GHz can reach the speed of 7Gbps. However, carrier waves in this frequency are poor in wave diffraction capacity and can be weaken greatly when transmitting in the air. What s more, its transmission distance and signal cover is very limited, and therefore it s only been used in small rooms.

Under the current network transmission conditions, to achieve perfect wireless VR experience, users will have to carry a 4KG computer, plus peripherals, VR helmets and earphones etc., which is quite a heavy burden. The worst part is, the battery life of this whole set is only 1 1.5 hours.

Only quantum technology that enables high-speed transmission can solve this problem.

Quantum chip

Besides high-speed lossless transmission, the information processing capacity brought by quantum technology proves to be the crucial technology that powers immersive VR experience. The latest success of the Quantum Lab of University of Science and Technology of China on semiconductor quantum chip marks a breakthrough in quantum computer research.

Quantum chip is the brain of quantum computer. Empowered by quantum chip, the computing performance of quantum computers can be incredibly greater than ordinary computers. Quantum computers can process 2^n of data simultaneously. Such parallel computing can pretty much slay any existing computer in the world including the super computers.

For instance, if you searched in a library system with the key word “John”, you might have about a hundred thousand results on a traditional computer. However, you won t know which book is which. As for a quantum computer, it can clone a hundred thousand you and each of the clone will read one book. All this computing process will only take a quantum computer a second.

If put into mass adoption, quantum computers can allow VR online games to have real-time rendering, vast super region game scenes, sharp graphics, and seamless experience in multi-player games. With quantum computers incredible computing power, VR online gaming experience will be perfect for gamers to enjoy.

In many science fictions, quantum computers have been described and are the future tendency. In the sci-fi movie Star Trek, it only takes the quantum computer seconds to beam a person. In theory, it will take current computing power 4500 trillion years to do that.

In Sword Art Online, game designer Heathcliff in 2022 used quantum technology and developed a VRMMORPG game called SAO, which trapped ten thousand players including the main characters in the virtual world for two years. All of these were achieved by quantum technologies.

Although it s still years afar before quantum technologies can be commercialized and enter common households, still the rise of Micius has lighted the torch that shines light on the path that leads to a VR gaming era.

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[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Lightspeed Hunter, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Garrett Lee (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.