Lately it seems like I find a news article almost every week talking about new ways that people are using broadband. The latest news is an announcement that AT&T is selling Magic Leap augmented reality headsets in six cities plus online.

The AT&T launch is being coordinated with the release of an augmented reality immersive experience that will bring The Game of Thrones into people’s homes with a themed gaming experience called The Dead Must Die, with a teaser in this trailer.

Augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that augmented reality overlays images into the local environment. A user will see characters in their living room as opposed to being immersed in a total imaginary environment with virtual reality.

Magic Leap is one of the most interesting tech start-ups. They started in 2014 with a $542 million investment, and since then have raised over $2.3 billion dollars. The company’s investors and advisors include people like Alibaba executive vice chair Joe Tsai and director Steven Spielberg. There have been rumors over the years of an impending product, but until now they’ve never brought a product to market. AT&T will be selling Magic Leap’s first headset, called the Magic Leap One Creator Edition for a price of $2,295. The mass-market headset will surely cost a lot less.

AT&T’s interest in the technology extends past selling the headsets. Magic Leap recently signed a deal with the NBA and its broadcast partner Turner which is now owned by AT&T and will obviously be looking at augmented reality broadcasts of basketball games.

AT&T’s interest goes even far beyond that and they are looking at the Magic Leap technology as the entry into the spatial Internet – moving today’s web experience to three dimensions. AT&T sees the Magic Leap headset as the entry into bringing virtual reality to industries like healthcare, retail and manufacturing. They envision people shopping in 3D, doctors getting 3D computer assistance for visualizing a patient during an operating, and manufacturer workers aided by overlaid 3D blueprints on the manufacturing floor.

While the Magic Leap headset will work on WiFi today, AT&T is promoting Magic Leap as part of their 5G Innovation Program. AT&T is touting this as a technology that will benefit greatly from 5G, which will allow users to go mobile and use the augmented reality technology anywhere.

I couldn’t find any references to the amount of bandwidth used by this first-generation headset, but it has to be significant. Looking at the Game of Thrones application, a user is immersed in a 3D environment and can move and interact with elements in the augmented reality. That means a constant transmission of the elements in the 3D environment. I have to think that is at least equivalent to several simultaneous video transmissions. Regardless of the bandwidth used today, you can bet that as augmented reality becomes mainstream that content makers will find ways to use greater bandwidth.

We are already facing a big increase in bandwidth that is needed to support gaming from the cloud – as is now being pushed by the major game vendors. Layering augmented reality on top of that big data stream will increase bandwidth needs by another major increment.