“I AM VERY OPTIMISTIC ON 5G, BUT IT NEEDS TO BE LOOKED AT FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF 10 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE, BECAUSE ITS IMPACT WILL BE LIFE-CHANGING.”

ONE OF THE PERKS of owning a McLaren 720S Spider is the ability to control the light in the cabin.

- Abhik Sen and Ashish Gupta

At the touch of a button, the tint of the panoramic sunroof can go up from 30% to 95%, thanks to the electrochromic glass. The technology is also reportedly used in some windows of the Boeing 787. But using the same tech in a phone takes some doing.

And Shenzhen-based smartphone maker OnePlus has done just that, with its ‘disappearing cameras’. A week after the unveiling of the Concept One phone at the CES, we got a demo by OnePlus founder and CEO Pete Lau himself on a bleak winter morning in Delhi. Lau had flown in the previous night from China. He looked a bit jaded from the 8,500-mile trip from Los Angeles to China to Delhi flown in a few days, but he showed no trace of fatigue when he demoed the Concept One. There’s a reason for Lau’s excitement: in his long-term vision for the next-generation 5G technology, he sees the smartphone as a supercomputer and super assistant. Lau, 44, in an interview with Fortune India spoke about his vision for 5G, how it can disrupt the way people interact with devices, the future of data consumption, and what smartphones will be like in 10 years. Edited excerpts:

What is your vision for 5G?

I am very optimistic on 5G, but it needs to be looked at from the perspective of 10 years into the future because its impact will be life-changing.

I would look at 5G as having three chief phases: The first can be called Era 1.0, and it represents the connectivity between the cloud and device(s). And so that particular phase over the next three years would demonstrate increases in speed and lowering of latency times, which would result in a much more seamless device-to-cloud experience. And that transmission will happen quickly.

We’ve already seen some changes; for example, the higher frame rates in gaming. Next could be camera applications—whether its photo or video— that would store directly in the cloud and function through the cloud.