Every day, thousands of tourists photograph Cologne Cathedral with cameras and smartphones.

But nobody has photographed the structure as often and in such detail as the Monheim-based company Northdocks.

In April 2020, the digitization specialist began recording the facade of Germany's most famous church with drones from really every angle.

Professionals carefully steered the aircraft at a distance of five to seven meters along the walls and towers, pinnacles, ornaments and figures - sometimes where no one has been for a century and a half.

The point of the exercise, which cost a six-figure euro sum: to produce a digital twin of the cathedral.

Thiemo Heeg

Editor in business.

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Northdocks project manager Silas Fuchs inspects the result with virtual reality glasses.

Whoever wears the computer glasses thinks they are standing in front of the building at a dizzying height.

VR gamers know this virtual reality in many ways, but here it is not a game.

The aim is to be able to identify even the smallest restoration work that will soon be due thanks to the high level of detail.

Because Northdocks assembled the more than 200,000 images provided by the drones into a 50 gigabyte 3-D model on behalf of the Cologne cathedral construction works.

Thanks to its 25 billion polygons, the virtual twin made of bits and bytes appears as real to the viewer as the real building made of stone.

A technology called 5G edge computing

The Cologne Cathedral is a chic demonstration object for Northdocks. But the ideas go far beyond the cathedral restoration scenario. The virtual reality should enable a lot: from training for fire and rescue workers to maintenance work on aircraft. So far, however, there has been one problem: high-performance stationary computers were required for the huge amounts of data and their processing. A transmission over the cellular network for employees who are on the move was difficult or even impossible in the past. "Digital twins combine an enormous amount of data that has to be transported to the end user," says Northdocks manager Fuchs. The interaction with the digital twin was firmly tied to one place.

That should change now. The mobile communications group Vodafone and Amazon's cloud division AWS have agreed on a strategic cooperation from which they promise a lot. 5-G edge computing is the name of the technology that seeks to combine the advantages of the new cellular standard and the cloud. “We are expanding our real-time network with real-time servers. Data is then processed directly in our network without any detours, ”promises Vodafone's Germany boss Hannes Ametsreiter.

To this end, Vodafone put three of the so-called multi-access edge computing servers (MEC) into operation.

"Right on the edge of the cellular network", as it is called, namely in three 5G data centers in Berlin, Dortmund and Munich.

The so-called Wavelength Services from AWS are integrated on these servers.

Whoever books them books - like in the cloud - external server services, but integrated into the cellular network.

Amazon promises "new opportunities in the cloud"

Amazon's subsidiary AWS, the world's largest cloud provider, presented the technology in 2019. For a few months now, thanks to cooperation with telecommunications groups such as SK Telecom, KDDI and Verizon, it has been up and running in South Korea, Japan and the United States. In Europe, Vodafone is advancing as an AWS partner in Great Britain and now in Germany. Questions about the potential of the "edge" technology are answered rather vaguely, but those involved expect a lot from it. AWS manager Sebastian Dreisch is certain: “This is the beginning of new possibilities in the cloud. We bring the cloud to wherever customers want to use it. ”Ametsreiter speaks of a unique innovation boost in mobile communications.

So what is possible? The enthusiasm for the new technology still seems to be greater than the amount of real ideas, let alone implementations. Most of the “use cases” cannot be foreseen today, they say. Vodafone refers to examples such as real-time data for holograms, for augmented and virtual reality and for robot control. And of course on the networked road traffic of the future, when vehicles are supposed to warn each other of dangers via cellular network: “In these situations, every millisecond counts.” AWS names data-intensive applications such as high-resolution live video streaming or medical diagnostics. 

With regard to digital twins, Silas Fuchs has a specific idea why it is no longer possible today without 5 G and the “real-time computers” in the cellular network.

With VR glasses, he says, the deviation between one's own movements and a lagging computer image should only be very small.

“If I have a headset on and the picture is following, I immediately feel sick.

A latency that is minimally too high ensures that movement and image are no longer in sync. ”That is enough to“ get even die-hard VR users like him out immediately ”.

15 milliseconds are the maximum - and that can only be delivered by the fast cellular standard.