As the pandemic looms, the Tokyo 2020 Games are only a few days away.

Though the only spectators allowed to experience the events in person will be stakeholders, new technologies promise to bring greater immersion to those in attendance.

The 2020 – now 2021 – Games are the first to feature their own COVID-inspired Olympic Virtual Series, pitting gamers and athletes against each other from afar.

In one event, pro cyclists competed from around the world on exercise bikes in the sweaty comfort of their own homes.

But on-site at the Games, Noriyuki Furuno's team will be helping spectators get an upgraded experience. He works for NTT Docomo, one of Japan's major network providers.

"At a normal swimming event, spectators are very much engrossed in the action," said Furuno. "But if you want to check out player records or other stats, you have to look up at a display on a wall somewhere else. So people would have to go back and forth between the pool and the display."

At swimming events, his team will hand out augmented reality (AR) goggles to spectators that are enabled by the high speed and ultra-low latency offered by fifth-generation (5G) cellular communications. 

While keeping their eyes on the action, spectators can see who is in what lane, lap times, and if a swimmer is close to breaking a world record, for example.

But what about if you're not in the same room as the action? Being able to transmit that kind of precise data requires cutting-edge transmission technology end-to-end.

That will take some work, but Docomo's experience designer Akiji Tanaka says there are interesting applications ahead. 

He predicted, "In the future, we could send competition data directly to another pool set up in another location – replicating the swimmers in the pool and all the data that comes with it via those glasses and casting it over the empty pool." 

Tanaka said that a greater level of immersion is available to be unlocked. "I think spectators will be able to watch and participate in sports happening very far away without being bound by their physical location."

AR isn't the only technology bringing people together. One market research firm says Facebook's Quest 2 virtual reality headset has likely sold over ten million units, and with that level of adoption, businesses are using it to bring employees into the same virtual space.

Gordon Cooper, a designer for virtual reality collaboration software vSpatial, said 5G and virtual reality advancements are helping people get together even without a gaming-level PC or even strong home Wi-Fi.

Cooper said the barriers to entry are falling rapidly. "You can connect to a virtual machine hosted on the cloud, so you don't even need a PC to be able to work from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection. Very soon, we predict that headsets will support 5G, so you won't even need a strong Wi-Fi connection; you'll just need a strong 5G connection."

Now that 5G services are live in Japan and other countries, they are enabling new solutions offering more immersive and real-time experiences, whether in VR, AR, or a mix of the two. 

And, as the hardware evolves, lots of exciting developments are ahead.