Alvaro Villegas
Innovation Architect, Nokia XR Lab
Passionate Telecom Engineer, married and father of 4 boys, I've dedicated my nearly 30 years of professional life to research and innovation in the field of digital video. I am currently the Head of Extended Reality Lab in Nokia Spain. I love producing impact in society with my work, so my current goal is applying all this video background to what I consider the next Big Step in human communication: immersivity, leveraging the maturity of Mixed Reality (XR) technology. Complementing the virtual worlds of the Metaverse initiatives, my approach comes from a different angle: Real Reality (the Realverse), capturing people and their surrounding at different locations and blending all of them into a shared communication experience in front of our senses. It is a complex and exciting technology challenge with the potential of completely changing the way in which we humans interact, and I am fortunate enough to lead am extraordinary team of brilliant people capable of making it a reality. A new Reality.
I am the Head of Extended Reality Lab in Nokia Spain. Graduated as Telecom Engineer by Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, MBA core, 28 years of experience innovating in digital video, developed in Telefonica, Auna, Motorola (Germany), Nagravision, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia. Worked in many different areas (Research, Product deveopment, CTO office, sales, management), always with a strong technical focus. Proudly leading and inspiring a team of prime researchers in Nokia Spain.
I have created the concept of Distributed Reality: a rich merge of realities captured in real time at different locations in the world which are presented in front of people's senses using last generation immersive technology (XR). The research objective encompasses finding solutions for the immense technology challenge that this presents, implementing early protoypes that demonstrate the concept, and a deep analysis on the Quality of Experience. Also at the center of our industrial research work are the practical applications (and commercial outlook) that this concept will enable, its associated network requirements (5G/6G), and eventually the deep social impact that it will have on people's lives. For this goal we rely on the intersection of video, XR, AI/ML and QoE.
A short video is worth 1k images (and hence 10k words)...
... although I still use words for my talks in different forums
Ideas deserve protection
Sharing our work with the world
Until our XR technology is ready you will have to use this old-fashioned mechanism
I currently live in Madrid, Spain.
I work in Nokia Spain, also in Madrid.
I also lived and worked in Munich, Germany.
And I love Málaga, the best place to live in Europe.
