Immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality in Healthcare: Implications of Augmented Reality Applications for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)

Rapid urbanization and the design of smart cities create new challenges for the safety and well-being of their citizens. Among the factors that affect citizens’ safety are demographic explosion, an increase of public transportation and private vehicles, overcrowding by pedestrian road users, and unsafe driving behaviors. The increase in vehicular traffic-related fatalities in many urban areas can be averted by the implementation of safe mobility solutions for smart cities. 5G networks are touted as a game-changing mobile communications advancement because they provide high data rates with ultra-low latency for the benefit of real-time applications such as augmented reality. Beyond speed improvement, 5G is expected to unleash a massive 5G Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem where networks can serve communication needs for billions of connected devices in the context of smart cities, with the right trade-offs between speed, latency, and cost. Recently, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) has emerged as a new hybrid type of communication between transport vehicles (V2V), pedestrians (V2P), infrastructure (V2I), and networks (V2N), which requires the features of the 5G network to provide application connectivity and for citizens’ new mobile services. V2X uses cases/applications that enable vehicles to connect and exchange data with other vehicles, traffic lights, parking spaces, nearby people, and services to coordinate traffic flow and environmental safety. Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that can greatly enhance the implementation of V2X in terms of information processing and public safety. AR can transform the way users and devices work by turning information into immersive experience to enhance drivers’/passengers’ deep sensing and situational awareness, provide improved real-time hazard alerts, and inform traffic scenarios and pedestrian behavior. This chapter discusses the implications of AR technologies in V2X, as well as the challenges and future directions in the implementation of these emerging technologies.