Teenagers and Time Travel - 6G in 2040

Future communication technologies such as 6G will change our daily lives.

Join us on a trip to the year 2040 to see how everyday life has changed thanks to faster and ubiquitous wireless communication. See how Gabriella's everyday life in 2040 compares to that of her parents as teenagers.

07:00 Time to get up and get dressed

The alarm clock has been ringing for a few minutes and Gabriella's personal robot gently wakes her up by lighting up the room and telling her what's planned for the day. Gabriella stretches and slowly gets out of bed. She only turned 18 last week and still can't quite grasp the fact that she is now officially an adult. But as of June 6, 2040, she is! She was born in 2022, at the time of the 5G launch, and grew up in a time when wireless communication was taken for granted by everyone: always available, always fast, always reliable. Now, in 2040, 6G is up and running worldwide, and a typical day for Gabriella looks very different to when her parents were teenagers.

Gabriella eats breakfast, takes a quick shower and gets dressed for school. Her favorite outfit is clean, so it's easy to decide what to wear. She puts on leggings, a gray T-shirt and a silver jacket with her school logo. The jacket is her favorite, not just because of the logo, but because it's the most modern jacket she has. Thanks to the 6G network, the latest jackets can collect data from all relevant sources in real time. The model she bought can supplement its own sensors with data from sensors in the surrounding area and online cloud services. If it's cold outside, the jacket knows this and can pre-warm itself so it's already warm before she puts it on. It also keeps track of its temperature so it can warm up or cool down exactly when it needs to. After just one wear, the jacket had already learned that Gabriella gets cold easily, so it stays slightly warmer than the factory-set temperature. Her jacket was one of the first to be made after the Cradle to Cradle law came into force. When she first bought the jacket, she was worried that the recycled fibers would be scratchy, but they are incredibly soft. Her parents were more concerned that the recycled electronics and sensors wouldn't last long - after all, some of the materials are from the 5G era and are older than Gabriella herself. But the recovery and upcycling processes have improved so much that the recycled electronics are just as reliable as new ones.

10:00 Holographic school with classmates from all over the world

Gabriella has a choice between online and face-to-face classes, but she wants to meet her friends in person (weather permitting!), so she goes in person today. Her class has French, along with a partner school in Equatorial Guinea. She has noticed a big difference in student participation in Guinée équatoriale, as they call it in French class, since the school improved their internet connection. In the early years, the video quality was so poor that they could barely understand each other. Thanks to the new integration of 6G with satellite networks, both schools have excellent internet connections. To encourage students to work more closely together, most coursework is done in pairs, with one student from Gabriella's school working with a student from Equatorial Guinea. Gabriella's partner is Gasira, who also turned 18 this year. The two schools have set up a holographic telepresence for the two classrooms, so it looks and feels like Gasira is sitting right next to Gabriella, even though she is half a world away. Most of the time this is helpful because they can work together as if they were sitting in the same room. But Gasira is the class clown and likes to whisper jokes to Gabriella, which makes her laugh out loud and gets them both in trouble.

14:00 An after-school job, working with the cobots

Gabriella works a few hours a week after school for a company that packs organic food for an online delivery service. The work is pretty boring, but it pays well, and if there's anything left over at the end of the day, she can usually take some of the produce home with her. The students worked on the assembly line, putting the vegetables into the crates as they moved along the belt. They had to read a list on each crate to see what each customer had ordered. Annoying! Nobody does that anymore - drones and cobots took over all the packing work years ago. Lighter orders are also delivered by drones, but larger and heavier orders are delivered by autonomous delivery vans. The students supervise the loading of the heavy boxes onto the trucks. Gabriella works together with a cobot: When the drones have finished packing a crate, Gabriella points to the crate to be loaded and then to one of the trucks waiting at the loading ramp, and the cobot carries the heavy crate to the right place. She's glad the cobots are there to do the heavy lifting, because some of the crates weigh more than she does. When she first started working there, Gabriella's mother was worried (to put it mildly) that a cobot might drop a crate on her and injure her. But since object detection with radar has been incorporated into 6G, the factory uses its 6G network to pinpoint the exact location of all humans and all cobots. The exact movements of the cobots are carefully monitored and coordinated, and the reaction time of the cobots is so fast that Gabriella couldn't get hit by a box even if she tried (she actually tried once, just to see what would happen... but the cobot was faster than her).

17:00 Visiting grandma and grandpa on their smart farm

On the way home from work, Gabriella stops at her grandparents' farm. It's a small farm, really tiny, barely bigger than the plot of land on which her parents' house stands. But thanks to a combination of permaculture and vertical gardening over several floors, this small plot of land produces enough fresh produce to supply 15 families with fruit, vegetables and grain all year round. A swarm of miniature farm robots, about the size of a field mouse, works around the clock on the farm, monitoring each individual plant by measuring soil moisture and temperature, adjusting local lighting, and watering or fertilizing each plant to ensure optimal growth. Gabriella wishes the farm robots really looked like field mice, then they would be cute, but they look more like big insects, which is kind of creepy to her. The farm robots are in constant communication with nearby robots and with a central farm control computer via 6G to both coordinate their individual activities and ensure farm-wide optimization. The early farm robots had solar panels on their backs, but their grandparents have recently upgraded to zero-energy robots that can harvest energy from vibrations in the air. And the newer ones also have improved self-monitoring and self-healing capabilities, so they can anticipate impending problems and head to the maintenance station on their own. Every now and then, Gabriella picks up one of the robots and stops it from working, just to see how the rest of the swarm reacts.

Her favorite time of year on the farm is when the "butterflies" are in action. Her parents hire a swarm of butterflies when it's time to pollinate plants on their farm with plants from other farms. The butterflies are actually just miniature drones programmed to cross-pollinate certain pairs of plants over distances. But they are much prettier than the normal farm robots and glisten in the sun. There is still a lot of natural pollination, but Gabriella's grandparents prefer to help the butterflies by collecting pollen from the strongest plants within flying distance. The latest generation of butterflies use sensor data from the 6G network to physically find the same plant species, and then apply artificial intelligence to determine which plants in the area are most likely to produce the best yield. But the butterflies aren't there today. Gabriella picks an apple from one of the trees and goes home for dinner.

18:30 Holographic tennis with a good friend

After dinner, Gabriella calls her friend Gina to ask her if she would like to play some tennis. Gabriella and Gina have been best friends since kindergarten, and both were heartbroken when Gina's family moved away. Luckily, they both found holographic tennis courts near their homes, so they can still see each other virtually on a regular basis. Gabriella packs up her tennis gear and heads to the holographic court. Her half of the court is like a classic tennis court. But instead of the other half of the court for her opponent, Gina, there is a life-size sports sensor screen (TM pending) on the other side of the court where the net would normally be.

Sensors surrounding her half of the court and sensors surrounding Gina's half of the court capture the movements of both players, their swings, speed and direction. The data from the tennis court sensors is fused in real time with the data from the 6G sensor platform, then translated into holographic images and projected onto the screen. From Gabriella's point of view, it looks exactly as if Gina is standing opposite her at the net and trying to hit the ball over her head.

They didn't have time to play a full set, but Gina won both games this time. Gabriella should really practice more.

20:00 Catching up with George and his medical digital twins

After the match and quick showers, Gabriella and Gina head home. Gabriella missed a call from George, so she calls him back. George is Gabriella's older brother by two years and is studying medical technology at university. He called because he needed a short break from working on his dissertation. He is helping to develop a digital twin for a hospital operating theater to improve remote surgery. Neither digital twins nor remote medicine are new, but 6G has opened up possibilities that were not technically feasible before. George's dissertation is part of a research project to create a digital twin of the patient, on which operations are then practiced to train new surgeons.

His part of the project is "human tissue modeling", i.e. simulating how different types of human tissue move or deform when pressure is applied. 6G enables extremely precise sensing and positioning, so that the patient twin knows exactly where and how the remote surgeon is inserting an instrument: at what angle? at what speed? with how much pressure? George models how the tissue would react to give the surgeon tactile feedback that feels just like real human tissue. Research hospitals around the world provide patient twins to other students and surgeons to create a shared pool of twins that can be used to test new instruments, techniques or therapies. George hopes that his work will improve the quality of these patient twins to improve patient outcomes.

Gabriella loves listening to George talk about university because he just can't hide how much fun he is having. Gabriella hopes to find a specialty that she enjoys just as much. She also wants to help shape the future. But she has no idea what to study...

Something to do with new technologies, but what?

Note: How about communication? 7G is on the rise...