Amazon and Vodafone agree to cooperate

TEvery day, thousands of tourists film Cologne Cathedral with cameras and smartphones. But no one has photographed the structure as often and in detail as the Monheim-based Northdocks. In April 2020, the digitization specialist began recording the facade of Germany’s most famous church with drones from all angles. Professionals carefully guided the plane at a distance of five to seven meters along walls, towers, peaks, ornaments and figures – sometimes to where no one had been for a century and a half. The goal of the exercise, which cost a six-figure euro sum: to produce a digital twin of the cathedral.

Silas Fox, Northdocks project manager, inspects the result using virtual reality glasses. Everyone who wears computer glasses thinks they are standing in front of the building at an astonishing height. Virtual reality gamers know this virtual reality in many ways, but it’s not a game here. The goal is to be able to spot even the smallest restoration work that will soon be established thanks to the high level of detail. Because Northdocks has collected more than 200,000 drone images in a 50 GB 3D model on behalf of the Cologne Cathedral construction work. With 25 billion polygons, the virtual twin of bits and bytes looks as real to the viewer as a real building made of stone.

A technology called 5G computing

Cologne Cathedral is an elegant demonstration object for the Northdocks. But the ideas go beyond the scenario of the restoration of the cathedral. Virtual reality should offer a lot: from training firefighters and rescuers to maintenance work on planes. However, there has been one problem so far: high-performance stationary computers were required for the massive amounts of data and their processing. Transferring over the cellular network for mobile employees was difficult or impossible in the past. “Digital twins collect a huge amount of data that needs to be passed on to the end user,” says Northdocks Director Fuchs. Interaction with the digital twin was highly correlated with a single location.

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That must change now. Vodafone Mobile Group and Amazon AWS Cloud have agreed on a strategic collaboration of which they promise a great deal. 5-G edge computing is the name of the technology that seeks to combine the benefits of the new cellular standard and the cloud. “We are expanding our real-time network with real-time servers. The data is then processed directly in our network without any detours,” promised Hannes Ametsreiter, President of Vodafone Germany.

Frank Mccarthy

<p class="sign">"Certified gamer. Problem solver. Internet enthusiast. Twitter scholar. Infuriatingly humble alcohol geek. Tv guru."</p>

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