Back to the Pandemic? We Tested a Web Metaverse with 1,000 Users Watching a Live Concert
Do you remember four years ago, back in 2020? In Korea, the COVID-19 crisis alert level was raised to ‘severe’ in February 2020. Many thought it would end quickly, but the ‘severe’ alert persisted until April 2022. During this period, social distancing and outdoor mask-wearing were mandatory, and many offline activities were canceled.
During that time, the metaverse gained significant attention. The metaverse emerged to facilitate meetings that could not happen offline, requiring real-time synchronization similar to online meeting solutions, unlike the asynchronous nature of traditional web forums. Game-based metaverses, with their ability to synchronize 3D environments and accommodate large numbers of users, attracted considerable interest and saw an increase in value.
With the ‘severe’ alert lifted in April 2022, the pandemic ended, and it became rare to see people wearing masks outdoors as we returned to normal life.
So, what happened to the value of the metaverse left by the pandemic? While popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite are still thriving, the rosy future we envisioned did not materialize, and many metaverse companies have ceased operations. Does this mean the metaverse had no value? I don’t think so. I believe the challenge was that the metaverse was too burdensome to sustain continuous value creation.
IT technology is typically valued for providing new experiences or reducing costs. The metaverse was more about new experiences, but it did not significantly reduce costs. High-quality graphics, in particular, were prohibitively expensive. The idea of hosting thousands of people in a realistic virtual environment, while ignoring the inverse relationship between large user numbers and lightweight software, was unrealistic. The marketing hype fueled by Web3 further overshadowed serious engineering efforts.
Believer is still pursuing the metaverse, aiming for a more affordable and accessible approach. During the pandemic, few companies or services actually had large-scale events in the metaverse. However, Believer managed to host several large-scale events, including ComingM with Hyundai Department Store Group and admission and graduation ceremonies for Chonnam National University. These were hastily organized, with limited quantitative assessment, relying on AWS infrastructure to get through the event periods. Such efforts were possible because we directly implemented WebRTC architecture on a cloud infrastructure.
Recently, our government projects and investment conditions have highlighted the need for large-scale user access. As a small company (currently even a one-person operation), we focus on sharing our service evolution in real-time rather than on marketing, aiming to communicate the true level and vision of our technology without exaggeration.
For detailed information, please refer to the Notion page below. This serves as part of the developer guide document for those interested in using our XRCLOUD service.
Today, we are sharing a video of a test where 1,000 users accessed 10 rooms streaming live in FHD. Since this is WebXR, it is also compatible with XR devices. During the pandemic, this is the kind of ultimate form of performance and event we wanted to demonstrate. As calculated, this test was successfully completed without issues. However, maintaining stability for more than 120 users remains challenging, and we will explore various approaches over time to address this.
In the future, we plan to offer room formats divided into 25-person meeting formats, lecture and stage formats for up to 100 participants, and larger-scale events. We will also provide more detailed options through APIs.
I am unsure about the current demand for this, but if XRCLOUD achieves sufficiently low costs, I believe it could provide a valuable new means of communication with distant individuals.
