The human perspective of the wireless world

The Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) is a global academic and industry forum, which is contributing to the visions of future wireless communications and is identifying research topics on which to build the vision. The next two decades promises us almost unimaginable communication capabilities; the technology can deliver almost anything we want it to, but the key to success is understanding what capabilities people will find valuable, and how to simply access those capabilities. The WWRF is putting the user at the centre of its visions by identifying research, which uncovers the functionality that people will value in the future. These research topics fall into three areas; understanding the user, by studying human behaviour and needs, the development of next generation technologies becomes user requirements driven rather than technology lead; new generic application elements, in which technologies closely associated with the understanding of the user, such as virtual reality, are identified for research; and new interaction techniques, which allow for intuitive interaction between humans and the terminals and underlying network services. Studying the user, especially in these research areas, is the only way to ensure that the future wireless world meets and exceeds the expectations of people in the coming decades.