KDDI and Mawari to Launch a Digital Human as a Service (DHaaS) Using AWS Wavelength

Digital human assistants along with seamless indoors-to-outdoors navigation

TOKYO & SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–KDDI and Mawari are pleased to announce a Digital Human as a Service(DHaaS) that will debut in December 2021 leverages the ultra-low latencies enabled by AWS Wavelength.¹

This proof of concept features a multilingual, Digital-Human Guide who provides seamless indoor and outdoor wayfinding services in Ginza, Tokyo, all delivered with AWS Wavelength and the KDDI au 5G Network. For example, users can experience easy navigation from the subway to a shopping mall, and upon entering, navigate to specific shops and find special offers. A video demonstrating the PoC is available at https://youtu.be/6oReBJ5h8qs

This proof of concept is facilitated by the combined strengths of each of the partners in this project:

• Outdoor navigation capabilities of the system utilize Sturfee’s Visual Positioning System (VPS) based on high-definition satellite imagery, while indoor navigation utilizes Immersal’s VPS based on maps made with pre-scanned images of interior spaces. When moving from outdoors to indoors the system transitions smoothly providing an uninterrupted user experience.

• Content delivery to mobile devices is powered by AWS Wavelength, KDDI�s au 5G network, and Mawari’s proprietary XR Streaming CODEC that enables the highest content fidelity to be streamed to smartphones by substantially lowering the heavy processing requirements of real-time digital humans, reducing cost, data size and battery consumption while unlocking scalability.

The entire user experience is also augmented with virtual guidance signs and opens B2C options via advertisements and helpful information that can be placed precisely in both outdoor and indoor environments.

In addition, a demo of the Digital-Human Guide will be available in the AWS Marketplace² in mid-December, showcasing Mawari’s patent-pending 3DXR content streaming platform for the Metaverse. This is the first of many services that will be running on Mawari’s 3DXR content streaming platform, and the partners anticipate 3rd party deployments of these capabilities globally in locations spanning sports facilities, universities, hospitals, tourist destinations, museums and educational centres.

Mawari Quote

“Our team is very proud to be part of this collaboration between leading-edge partners. Over the past 3 years Mawari has worked closely with KDDI – one of the most visionary companies in Japan – to release award-winning AR streaming, consumer facing installations across the arts, advertising and retail sectors. These projects have been instrumental in developing and delivering the right technical and aesthetic capabilities to develop and deliver our CODEC and platform contributions to this project.”

1: AWS Wavelength: AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services at the edge of 5G networks (including the au 5G network) and enables developers to build applications and services that require increased speeds, massive bandwidth, and ultra-low latency, such as machine learning inference, Internet of Things (IoT), and video and game streaming.

2: AWS Marketplace: A managed and curated software catalogue that allows customers to find, buy and immediately deploy third party software

About KDDI Corporation

To individual customers, we provide smartphone, mobile phone, and other mobile communication services as well as fixed-line services including “au HIKARI.” Furthermore, we are also providing MVNO services within group companies such as UQ Communications in addition to mobile services under the au brand. Going forward, we will further expand and integrate telecommunications services with life design services such as commerce, finance, energy, entertainment, and education to provide new forms of experience value for the enjoyment and convenience of our customers. In order to do so, our goal is to understand customers’ needs by analyzing various types of data, offering appealing proposals, and becoming an important part of our customers’ lives.

https://www.kddi.com/english/corporate/kddi/our-business/personal/.

About Mawari Inc.

Mawari, Inc. has been pioneering the creation of cloud rendering and streaming technology for interactive XR experiences since 2018. Since then, Mawari’s partner list is a who’s-who of visionary innovators in telecom and entertainment including Sapporo Breweries Ltd., Adways Co., Ltd, AFK Australia and KDDI Corporation. As part of its larger technology stack, Mawari has developed a proprietary, XR-focused 3D Streaming CDN that renders 3D content in the cloud and delivers it efficiently to devices. Core to this is Mawari’s unique, patent-pending 3D Streaming CODEC / compression technology that minimizes the weight of 3D content and enables real-time rendering and streaming to smartphones and XR glasses. Mawari’s mission is to accelerate the arrival and widespread adoption of synthetic reality experiences to meet the demands of its visionary clients and has been working relentlessly to solve real-world challenges to meet the demands of visionary XR partners.

For more information, please visit https://mawari.co.jp or contact konnichiwa@mawari.co.jp.

About Sturfee Inc.

Sturfee Inc. is a technology company developing breakthrough solutions in Visual Positioning Service (VPS) enabling smartphones, wearable, and autonomous machines recognize 3D surroundings and operate intelligently using AI and computer vision. Our mission is to create a highly scalable 1:1 machine readable representation of the world from the skies and ground. We offer 5G AI infrastructure as service providing spatial intelligence to any camera device simply with a few images taken from the ground. In other words, we allow machines to “see” the world through cameras similar to how humans do. Once our cities become VPS-enabled, the possibilities are endless. Augmented Reality (AR) is the first use case we enable.

About Immersal Ltd.

Immersal Ltd is a Helsinki, Finland based company with a mission to provide software solutions for Spatial Mapping and Visual Positioning for everyone, everywhere and any device. Company delivers solutions globally with its core focus on Mobile Operators and Large Enterprises. Immersal ltd is a fully owned subsidiary of Hexagon AB, listed in Stockholm Stock Exchange.

For more information contact:

Anttoni Vesterinen, CEO Immersal Oy, +358 40 750 1717 anttoni@immersal.com

Contacts

Mawari, Inc.

Luis Oscar Ramirez Solorzano

CEO

+81-3-6416-1096

luis@mawari.co.jp