Just to be clear I´m NOT explaining what the metaverse is just to collect clicks on my article. Sorry for saying it directly, but I think it is important not to be just another article on Metaverse.
But if you want to know more about it I can recommend a great article here.
The better question would be why I´m now writing an article about the Scale of Metaverses.
The reason is that I’m fascinated by technology and I have an Oculus Quest 2 VR glass which makes me think I know what it means to be part of a virtual world.
Really Ralf? Do you know that gaming has been doing this already for a long time without the need for VR glasses? Do I hear this often? Sure, I agree that 3D worlds are not new for game engines, Digital Twins, Defence Simulations, etc. and it is just another term for 3D worlds.
But why are companies such as Microsoft, Disney and Meta (Facebook) investing so much money to build their metaverses now when Second Life years ago did not reach the level they expected?
I like the thinking of having virtual events, virtual concerts, social and professional networking in virtual offices, and a better retail user experience. This doesn´t mean it is only done with VR glasses. Think through having Digital Twins of several suppliers (e.g. Automotive) connected through the metaverse and Synthetic Training Environments of Nato partners connected through a special defence metaverse.
The key element from my perspective is to have the connection of the existing web 2.0 and web 3.0 very well integrated. There will not be one metaverse in the world.
All of the metaverses which are built by several companies should be integrated into each other and make it smooth and easy for users to join.
But this is now really the hard part. How to get to this scale level of having several millions of people in one world and having millions of objects in the metaverse making it smooth to connect and be part of the web 3.0 world?
I give you a great example of how fast you can fail with connections in one metaverse. Meta invested a lot of money into the Foo Fighter event and failed with the connections in their metaverse. Game developers know what I’m talking about and it is a huge issue for everyone in 3D development. See the article here to see that issue in more detail.
It is not an issue to get so many people in a spread-out online 3d world. But converging them into one metaverse, one world, one arena, one gameplay, one workplace is a key challenge for the metaverse and I just guess that the simulation falls over with too many connections on one event.
Not only the connections are challenging for all 3d worlds which include the metaverse. Guess you are covering the connection issues by optimizing them with distributed and edge computing. What about the world itself?
Claiming doing 10M entities/objects/players in metaverse worlds, like some vendors love to state and showcasing a nicely distributed simulation has only limited use. The complexity comes into play when the 10M entities/objects/players start converging to one place and compute demands increase dynamically as the simulation progresses. In a real use case such as online music events, disaster planning or gaming simulations need to be able to handle sudden movements into congested areas. Do you see the challenges now for this Foo Fighter event?
Get a sneak peek here how this could look like and how this works technically.
My feedback would be that I would like to see the “old” and “new” internet as one internet from web 2.0 to web 3.0 with a seamless user experience from gaming to events to retail without any boundaries.
By the way, did you know Second Life had the same problem as Meta with the event above dealing with too many connections and too many entities? The metaverse can´t be standalone and the challenges are immense. Throwing more money into one metaverse will not solve the problem. Scale the metaverses and bring them to life for a seamless user experience is the key to success from my perspective.
What are your thoughts?
Originally posted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scale-metaverses-ralf-paschen/