“The metaverse may be the next generation of the internet,” say researchers at Citi. “Use cases may include everything we use the internet for today with gaming, commerce, art, media, advertising, smart manufacturing, health care, virtual communities, and social collaboration, including for enterprise and education.”
But the digital infrastructure is not yet ready to support metaverse platforms, looking only at application latency performance. Today’s cloud-based gaming, for example, sports end-to-end latency of between 75 milliseconds and 150 milliseconds.
But metaverse persistent and immersive environments will require end-to-end latency more on the order of 12 ms or less.
And though we often think of metaverse as something a user accesses using virtual reality goggles, there is good reason to believe metaverse use cases are more likely to happen using smartphones. The point is that value is not based strictly on three-dimensional graphics but “immersion” more generally.
“You can think about the Metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, has said. “And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage.”
So think of “immersion” more than 3D, “realism” more than “avatar.”
For digital infrastructure providers (narrowly defined), metaverse means investments in latency performance and bandwidth, above all. And that means edge computing, faster broadband and the ability to support untethered devices indoors and outdoors. Wi-Fi will play a part, but so will mobile networks.
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