Advancing the research and development of zero latency media technology

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President: Jun Sawada, hereinafter "NTT") will advance the research and development of the zero-latency media technology to overcome the sense of latency caused by human processing delay. Since communications to remote locations involve transmission and processing in support of the remote interaction with virtual worlds such as VR / AR, it is important to reduce the physical delays of components such as processing servers, and optical, and wireless networks. However, these delays will never reach zero in reality. Therefore, we are focusing on reducing the 'sense' of latency and so eliminate the discomfort created by the perceived latency.
We have entered into a discussion and interaction with Sony Corporation (headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Kenichiro Yoshida; hereinafter referred to as "Sony"), which is also researching zero latency technology, in order to explore increases in the user experience (see Fig.1).

In the future, we will establish the elemental technologies needed to realize zero latency media, such as the latency mechanism of human sense, near-future prediction using machine learning, and extracting feature-spaces by using deep learning. Moreover, we will promote the experimental verification of the R&D results in the field to achieve business services with our collaboration partners.

The NTT R&D Forum 2019, which will be held on November 14th and 15th, 2019, exhibited a proof of concept (PoC) demonstration that allowed the attendees to experience the zero-latency world that this technology aims for. The demonstration will use Sony Corporation's A(i)R Hockey / Doodle Pen to establish natural interactions that suffered no delays. In addition, the "Technology supporting IOWN × Entertainment", which includes this technology, will be demonstrated in the B1 exhibition hall. The real world that is aimed to be realized with this technology was demonstrated in the 2F hall.