Metaverse — Under the hood
This is the second of a multi-part series aimed at providing a 360 degree view on the Metaverse and how it will disrupt businesses in all industries. Part I provides a no-brainer introduction to Metaverse.
As an Innovation specialist when I speak to folks about the metaverse and the implications to businesses around the globe, one of the most common complaints I hear is that it is all promise and very limited real-world utility. While this feeling is normal for all emerging technologies, it comes from the lack of understanding of what layers the metaverse comprises. Many early adopters of Metaverses have come up with different layered view of the metaverse, this is how I look at the layers. Knowing this will enlighten us on the potential of the metaverse.
Layers of Metaverse
In my view, the metaverse has at least the below eight layers. Few are known to us and are common for anything digital, like network and infrastructure, while layers like spatial computing and decentralization are essential metaverse to create max impact. For the metaverse to achieve indistinguishability with physical reality, many or all the layers mentioned here need to mature as much as smartphones did in the last 10 years.
Network
The network layer must work in a way that it can flawlessly transfer GBs of data from long distance in real time to virtually recreate physical reality. This refers to availability of an always on, real-time, high bandwidth and decentralized transmission of data. Widespread adoption of 5G and then 6G would bring us closer to this dream. First, consistent high bandwidth connection for creating virtual worlds with a large number of virtual components in real-time. This means not having to store virtual worlds in the device. After all, if we are simulating reality in a virtual world, except for the fabric of the virtual world, everything else will have to be loaded based on ground reality. Second, very low-latency which is the time delay between the user action and the response. For example, in an online football game, latency is the millisecond it takes after the player clicks the key in the keyboard to save the goal to the goalkeeper character in the virtual game actually jumping to save the goal. The less this time the better it is to feel the game to be real. In games like that even a fraction of a second delay could mean loss of interest to play. Third, consistency of the network which is the continuous flow of data-packets without interruption. If the network frequently disconnects, having a high bandwidth and low latency is of no use.
Beyond 5G and 6G, improvement in today’s fiber optic network will help the last mile connectivity. The other promise in the network layer is the satellite internet connection. This includes multiple artificial satellites orbiting in Earth’s low orbit directly sending signals to base stations dish for internet. Today’s satellite is slow and cannot be used for metaverse applications; however, in a few years time, if all the existing bottlenecks are cleared, this could become the de facto network mode.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure layer comprises the hardware that is responsible for computing. Metaverse requires real-time computation of large amounts of data with minimal latency. For this to work, the graphic processing units and the onboard processor in the head mounted displays need to be upgraded by multifolds. For example, receiving all the changes happening in a digital world as it happens, then converting the data into 3D objects and then projecting it on the headset cannot be done with today’s processors. Today’s VR headsets solve this problem by processing some data locally and limiting the need to process by reducing the number of changes that are allowed. The advancement of processors and GPUs will therefore mean a huge leap in the experience that these processors can provide.
Google announced in 2019 that they achieved Quantum supremacy which is basically saying that a Quantum computer has solved a problem that our classical super computers cannot solve in a million years. Rapid advancements of Quantum computing would be a game changer for the metaverse. This is important in the context of metaverse because in order to create a futuristic experience we need futuristic infrastructure that can support it.
Hardware
The hardware layer comprises primary devices and secondary devices. Primary devices include today’s desktops, smartphones, head-mounted displays, other wearables like smart bands, smart glasses, haptic gloves, virtual reality suits, gesture devices and neural hardwares that would interact with the brain directly. These devices directly interact with the user in some way or the other.
The secondary devices are external devices that don’t require user’s interaction like voice processing devices, cameras that capture motion & gesture, body movement tracking will help in creating a digital twin, holographic 3D projection that overlays virtual reality on the physical world without the need to wear any glasses or headgear. These are called naked eye extended reality experiences. These experiences will blur the distinction between real and virtual and bring metaverses into our day-to-day lives.
Decentralization
The core of the metaverse is decentralization. Some form of decentralization is required at most layers of the metaverse as without it the metaverse wouldn’t be possible. This is because the scale of the metaverse is nothing that our current world systems have ever seen. For example, to render 3D objects in real-time with dynamic information from across the globe and still be real-time requires processing massive amounts of data. Doing this processing in a data center that is hundreds if not thousands of miles away (as it is being done today) cannot realistically provide the low latency that we need for a real time experience. So the data centers will need to be decentralized and moved to micro-data centers which would be close to the user. This will be achieved through adding these micro-data centers to existing mobile towers. Other areas of decentralization include the following:
- building apps that are decentralized — known as dapps from social media to everything under the sun
- browsers that capitalize on the decentralized cloud infrastructure using the Interplanetary file system (IPFS) instead of today’s HTTP
- Digital wallets like Metamask that acts as a way to bring your Ethereum based cryptocurrency into your decentralized metaverses
- Digital currency like Ethereum based MANA in metaverses like Decentraland
- Web 3.0 which has decentralization at the core of the internet
- Decentralized assets like digital land which will be owned by the users unlike our Instagram profile page which is owned by Facebook (Meta)
- Blockchains like Ethereum that essentially is a decentralized operating system for metaverse
- Smart Contracts that automatically execute, control or document legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.
- Managing decentralized metaverses through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) instead of a single entity like the CEO.
Spatial Fabric
The fabric of the current version of the metaverse, which is the digital worlds we view through the browser and extended reality headsets (VR, AR, MR) , is rendered through gaming engines like Unreal engine, Unity, etc. These along with spatial mapping technologies collectively create the metaverses we move around in.
This is the layer that converts today’s content that we have to read to understand into experiences that we can see, hear and feel. For example, instead of just showing specifications of a couch, with engines like Unity, the couch can be shown in real-world and with exact dimensions. This is more useful than just knowing the dimensions as now you can see if the couch would fit in your living room and would look good or not.
Creator economy
The creator economy is the fuel on which the metaverse will run. Creator economy includes people like social media influencers, videographers and bloggers who build the content we consume in famous platforms like Facebook, Blogger, YouTube and Instagram. There are more than 50 million of these people today who are influencing our lives. Due to the decentralized nature of the metaverse, instead of big companies, it is the creator economy that will create most of the experiences in the metaverse. And due to this, the number of people who will create content in metaverse could burst multifolds with most of us creating some kind of content or the other. One of the best known outcomes of the creator economy in the metaverse today is the non-fungible tokens or NFT. These are digital assets created by users and bought by other users in platforms like opensea which is a marketplace for NFTs.
The other key aspect of the creator economy is the tools necessary for the people who create the content. While platforms like Tik Tok provide in-built tools to make short videos, a bulk of the enterprise grade content is made in the likes of Adobe Creative Cloud. The same trend will continue in the metaverse. For example, Decentraland (Decentralized metaverse) provides the basic tools necessary to build your virtual establishments in the land you will buy from them, it also lets you build the digital assets outside and import them into Decentraland. Already companies like Ready Player One provide tools to create our avatar which can then be downloaded and used elsewhere. Also companies can use them and import the avatars into their games or other applications.
The design tools that will emerge in a big way are tools that will help create cool avatars, digital assets that characters will wear, games, establishments like a store in metaverse, concerts, etc.
Discovery
Today if we need to visit a grocery store and we don’t know where it is, we just google it or search in maps. In the metaverse, an intuitive version of discovering experiences needs to be built. Today’s metaverses use maps to solve this problem; but it is incremental innovation as it is not intuitive. Future metaverses will find intuitive ways to solve this puzzle. Finding destinations in the virtual worlds is important. But there are also other aspects of discovery that would need to evolve like app stores, curated content like music discovery in today’s spotify, virality — spreading the word of something that you like; today we do that through social media.
The other side of discovery is businesses finding us — the spamming part. Think of all the newsletters, personalized ads, notifications from your virtual world connections (like the store you are subscribed to). These would shape our day to day lives since these push discovery is what determines our day today starting from Instagram or whatsapp notifications to email alerts to App promotion notifications.
Experience
The metaverse will enable a new paradigm shift in everything that we do. The way we live at our homes, connect with our friends, entertain ourselves be it watching videos, attending concerts, watching movies, or playing games will be completely reimagined, but not necessarily making us couch potatoes. Naked eye extended reality experiences would transform our physical world into enriched experiences that we cannot live without. In fact metaverse could have the opposite effect of the common fear that we will be stuck at home. Metaverse could convert physical spaces into experience centers where you run around, play and interact.
The way we work will get better. With the pandemic, the world had to switch to video conferencing and we suddenly realized it is more convenient, efficient and effective as compared to traditional ways of working. However there are also challenges like inability to connect like in the physical world, make eye contact and understand body language. Metaverse will essentially solve that problem so that meeting someone in metaverse for a work meeting will be no different than a physical meeting, but only better because now you are at a comfortable place and also get to see additional details required to run the meeting in extended reality. A similar shift would be seen once the metaverse goes mainstream. On the enterprise side, employee collaboration, virtual offices, workforce training, virtual operations, hyper-personalized customer concierge and digital twins will not only make work interesting for the workforce, but also provide a customer experience which is never even dreamt of.
Conclusion
These layers are growing fast individually to collectively provide a metaverse experience that is commercially viable and compelling to customers. Considering the emerging nature of this space, some of these layers could merge and new ones created. Also, interestingly, each of these components has their own economy and did not come up anticipating the metaverse. Since many of these components have matured sufficiently, the world is trying to build metaverse experiences. And because the world is now creating these experiences, these individual technologies will converge to provide even more compelling experiences. This is why early adopters of metaverse believe the metaverse era has begun.
