Living in the metaverse: Are we there yet?

Los Angeles

THE concept of the metaverse goes back decades, but the excitement around it has never been higher than it is now. It generated much interest when Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced last October that the company would change its name to Meta, signalling that the company's future will be based on the metaverse.

After this, many other metaverse announcements followed in quick succession. Most recently, Microsoft spoke about its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard, saying it "will provide the building blocks for the metaverse".

But what is the metaverse? Simply put, it is the merging of virtual, augmented, and physical reality, blurring the line between online and real-life interactions.

It is easy to get excited about the possibilities of the metaverse. For instance, it would allow automotive engineers to perform virtual crash tests without using dummies, big-box retailers to expand into virtual goods and cryptocurrencies, gaming companies to introduce virtual rewards that can be sold for real money or saved in crypto wallets/banks, and more.

However, if the metaverse is going to be as transformational as the Internet and mobile wireless networks before it, organisations must ask themselves some serious questions about how they are going to get there. The metaverse is tomorrow's technology, and we cannot achieve it using yesterday's IT infrastructure. Until enterprises break free from the traditional approach to IT and replace it with modernised, distributed digital infrastructure, they would not be able to deliver the true promise of the metaverse.

Scaling persistent, immersive, real-time computing globally to support the metaverse will require computational efficiency 1,000 times greater than today's state of the art can offer. To realistically render avatars in a virtual world and allow users to interact with objects and other avatars in that virtual world - all in real time - is going to require truly mind-boggling amounts of data to be captured, transmitted, analysed and acted upon, with extremely low latency. We have seen companies achieve this for demos and small numbers of early adopters, but there's more to do before the metaverse can go mainstream.

The metaverse future - driven by digital infrastructure

Crusaders of the metaverse may assume that the necessary infrastructure upgrades will simply fall into place as the natural result of technological progress. But that is not the case. Enterprises can deploy a metaverse-ready digital infrastructure, but they need to be proactive about making it happen.

Today, organisations across the globe are growing interconnection bandwidth as they work to address their most pressing challenges. They are increasingly realising that an optimised digital infrastructure - one that brings together and interconnects physical and virtual computing, storage and networking capabilities, along with advanced applications and cloud services - can be an unmatched source of competitive advantage. Furthermore, the digital leaders are emphasising all three components of digital infrastructure: the digital core, the ecosystem and edge. Each component of digital infrastructure has a role to play in enabling the metaverse.

• Digital core: Breaking through the silos

Traditional IT architectures were based on siloed, centralised data centres; all transactions flowed through these data centres, regardless of where they originated. Today's digital core is different: only certain critical workloads need to be deployed on-premises at the core, but even these on-premises systems can be cloud-adjacent, allowing them to tap into transformational cloud services quickly and easily. In addition, digital core environments enable OPEX models, which can help enterprises balance their metaverse dreams against their financial realities.

• Digital ecosystem: Teaming up to overcome challenges

Building the metaverse is too big of a challenge for one company to even think about undertaking alone. Delivering the capabilities and capacity the metaverse demands will require an ecosystem of partners working together. This ecosystem will include cloud-service providers that help quickly scale-compute and enable rapid, reliable data migration; network service providers that help remove bottlenecks and virtualise key functions; and vendor-neutral interconnection partners that bring the whole thing together.

• Digital edge: Meeting users where they are

Deploying digital infrastructure at the edge is a key step towards making the metaverse possible. According to the GXI, edge locations are the bridge between the virtual and physical worlds; enterprises deploy infrastructure in these locations to get as close as possible to as many users as possible. When data sets are as large as those created by the metaverse, moving that data back and forth between users and centralised IT hubs creates unacceptable levels of latency. Infrastructure at the edge allows data to stay local, thereby keeping latency manageable.

• The writer is senior manager of segment marketing at Equinix