industryopinion
How do we build the Metaverse without the right infrastructure?
Mathieu Duperré, Founder of Edgegap explores how the likes of Epic, Meta and Roblox will handle the hosting and streaming of huge online environments, and their scalability for the future Metaverse.
T
here is huge hype around the concept of the Metaverse and how we might use it - but very little discussion around the infrastructure needed to make it happen.
In the early days of online gaming, anyone spending time in the
virtual worlds of Halo, World of Warcraft, RuneScape or Counter- Strike had to regularly put up with lag, disconnections, server time- outs and long loading screens. Thankfully, in the years since then, the global development of fast and dependable broadband, Fibre to the Kerb (FTTK), 5G and Wi-Fi 6 have given gamers fast, stable connections and unlimited bandwidth. In turn, this infrastructure has allowed for significant video games and virtual world developments. Being able to play games online and against your friends has
become the norm, whilst games such as Fortnite and Apex Legends can support thousands or even millions of online players at the same time thanks to the improvements in cloud computing, faster broadband connections and the like. The infrastructure required to deliver these experiences is
impressive, but even with the fastest connections, latency (the tiny delay between moving a controller and seeing that command happen in a game or on-screen) will always remain an issue. So too will the ability to deliver a consistent experience to gamers that may be playing on different devices with different connection speeds, separated by thousands of miles. So if it’s tough enough to create games that support at best a couple
of million players online at one time, what about the Metaverse - which, if the hype is to be believed, will be like the whole Internet combined with the biggest, most immersive game you’ve ever seen, all built in cinema-quality 3D virtual-reality. Before the opening of the Mobile World Congress event this
March, Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a statement saying the Metaverse will “require massive advances in connectivity,” while Intel’s senior vice president, Raja Koduri, acknowledged the difficulties of connecting millions of people in an entirely virtual environment, writing in a recent opinion article, “Our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision.” Addressing the technical challenges surrounding the Metaverse
won’t be easy. Meta’s VP Dan Rabinovitsj believes that “significant advancements in network latency, symmetrical bandwidth and overall speed of networks” will be needed to make the Metaverse a reality
16 | June 2022
– and that’s coming from a company with one of the most advanced server networks in the world. What about the video games and platforms with millions of
monthly users, such as Roblox and Fortnite? If they’re already creating Metaverse experiences, why can’t that just be replicated? The main issue is latency and bandwidth, but the video game industry has been working for decades to address this. Spreading server networks across the globe means that when hundreds of thousands of people are playing together, they’re only competing in server regions where latency is minimised on a geographical basis. Similarly, advanced hardware developments and the arrival of
next-gen consoles such as the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 mean that video game developers have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to counter latency, such as raytracing, netcode solutions and reducing the amount of data that players need to transfer by getting them to download patches in advance of virtual experiences, which is what Fortnite does with its virtual concerts. But problems begin to emerge when you throw virtual reality
headsets and real-time rendering for a virtual environment as grandiose as an all-encompassing Metaverse. As Rabinovitsj explained in his Meta post, video calling and Cloud-based video games require a latency of around 75–150ms, while some AAA video games such as fast-paced online shooters require sub 35ms. “Local real-time rendering could make it possible to meet such
tight latency constraints. But local rendering requires the entire virtual world, with all its effects and avatars, to be downloaded upfront before the experience can be consumed. For complex scenes with many avatars, this could take several hours to download over current networks,” he says. Tracking the facial expressions of avatars through VR headsets, eye-
tracking software for online shopping and general interactions with other players in virtual environments will require even lower latency. As stated by Meta, no single company, or industry, can build
the infrastructure required for the Metaverse alone, especially if the future of the Metaverse is a decentralised one. Thought needs to be given to scalable and optimised edge computing solutions, developments in hybrid and local real-time rendering, and major innovations in hardware and software stacks; the foundations need to be in place before anything approaching the vision of the Metaverse can be realised.
www.pcr-online.biz
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