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Underlying Infrastructure Will Be Key to Enabling the Metaverse to Reach Its Potential

Underlying Infrastructure Will Be Key to Enabling the Metaverse to Reach Its Potential Image Credit: LookerStudio/BigStockPhoto.com

The metaverse is blending real and virtual worlds to enable people to get things done better and faster. More than just fun and games, this alternative universe promises to help improve the way manufactures build cars, take people in underprivileged parts of the world to locations they would not been able to go and allow researchers, students and other interested parties to experience history in a new, more immersive and exciting way, among other things.

Last year was a momentous one for the metaverse. After renaming itself Meta at the end of 2021, the former Facebook went all-in on the metaverse in 2022. McKinsey & Company said that more than $120 billion of investment went into building metaverse technology in the first five months of 2022 - more than double the $57 billion invested in all of 2021. And metaverse regularly made headlines and made its way into the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries.

This was Wave 1 for the metaverse, which is akin to the first wave that artificial intelligence (AI) went through 10-15 years ago and similar to what the blockchain arena is experiencing today.

#1: Economic forces and faulty assumptions have pushed the metaverse into a maturity phase, in preparation for a second wave

Now the metaverse is preparing for Wave 2. As with all maturity cycles, this has started with layoffs, a reduction in investment in extravagant areas and a more critical assessment of Wave 1 assumptions. When you pump investment while ignoring key assumptions, it is hard to get the desired results.

I believe unmet metaverse aspirations happened due to two incorrect 2022 assumptions.

One was that corporate report cards in 2022 tended to value the commercial success of the metaverse as making money by selling devices – mostly to play games. A more holistic and meaningful success metric would be to see how the metaverse can be used for meaningfully productive applications in education and healthcare, and how this can lead to improved revenues and profitability by transforming complete ecosystems. When that goal is met, people across the world, and the best companies that sell and enable metaverse applications, will both benefit.

The other was an inadequate focus on the importance of user experience. Most people, me included, simply don’t want to have heavy glasses strapped to their heads for hours. It’s uncomfortable, makes us feel claustrophobic and prevents us from having a truly immersive experience. Whether it is minutes or hours that people spend in the metaverse, they have to come out of it feeling good. These factors have limited the appeal of the metaverse, acting as a barrier to mainstream adoption.

#2: 2023 will see more work on critical infrastructure to deliver the best metaverse experiences

But getting to a better metaverse will entail more than just improving virtual reality glasses and headsets. Realizing the promise of the metaverse is also about building better infrastructure.

The 2023 maturity pause that the metaverse is going through provides an ideal time for infrastructure upgrades to be in time for Wave 2. As a result, I do not expect to see a lot of new metaverse companies in the externally visible applications side of the metaverse in 2023. But I do anticipate a lot more emphasis in improving underlying network infrastructure.

Infrastructure is supremely important to everything that runs on top of it. Just consider the importance of pipes in supplying people with safe drinking water and the critical need to modernize underlying Federal Aviation Administration systems to keep planes in the air. Network infrastructure is similarly important to enabling metaverse and other applications.

Optimizing networks and experiences involves blending 5G, hyperscale computing and multi-cloud infrastructures in an application-friendly way and, of course, always paying attention to security by ensuring  secure routing infrastructure to enable an uninterrupted existence in the metaverse. 

#3: Low latency, proximity and multi-cloud are now critical to a growing number of applications

The metaverse user experience depends on ensuring that visual and haptic responses are equivalent to what would happen in the real world. That is a complicated problem to solve. But promise is on the horizon. 5G mobile infrastructure is leaps and bounds better than 4G networks at reducing latency - a critical factor in ensuring life-like experiences.

Many metaverse applications and AI use cases need access to compute, storage and network resources at short-hop distances and with low access times. For example, you can do training of large AI models using compute in the cloud, but inferences need action at the extremities - and these may be mobile like driverless cars. With edge computing, you can get compute, storage and network within a few hundred meters of where your application is running. That can deliver a much better experience than if you had to send your data to a data center thousands of miles away.

For a while, hyperscalers have succeeded in convincing everyone that their cloud is the only infrastructure that matters. In 2023, we are entering a realm where developers can build applications that consume infrastructure resident on multiple clouds on and/or off premises in a programmable and seamless way.

#4: Metaverse – meet “hybrid” infrastructure!

Martin Scott, an Analysys Mason analyst, was correct when he said that 2022 was “a messy one for the metaverse.” In my view, cleaning it up will require three infrastructure changes - efficient hybrid cloud infrastructure that is multi-cloud rather than depending on a single cloud, an effective blend of 5G communications with cloud, and finally truly programmable edge computing resources as opposed to just “edge washing” refreshes. For example, edge computing is not just about adding SD-WAN to enterprise branch offices or having hyperscalers create some extensions to their mammoth data centers. Such approaches can be helpful, but by no means are they sufficient to make network infrastructure programmable and capable of providing the agility, bandwidth and responsiveness that metaverse applications need. Wave 2 of the metaverse will be catalyzed by the availability of truly hybrid network infrastructure.

#5: Metaverse is the future, and it’s time to build the infrastructure to enable it now

While 2023 is a sobering point in time for the metaverse, it is also an opportunity for getting ready for the next wave. Various companies at CES 2023 demonstrated new metaverse applications, some of which integrated touch and smell. Down the road, hopefully they will advance the comfort level of wearables. But while we’re all trying out such new applications, it is important to remember that metaverse experiences depend on improvements to underlying network infrastructure - the foundation on which applications are built. Many such infrastructure technologies will be on display at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona.

I am bullish on Wave 2 for the metaverse. While there are various opinions on exact timing, I second McKinsey & Company forecasts that the metaverse could generate $4- to $5-trillion in value across consumer and enterprise use cases by 2030.

Author

Shekar Ayyar is the chairman and CEO of Arrcus, the hyperscale networking software company and a leader in core-to-edge network infrastructure. Ayyar was previously executive vice president and general manager of VMware’s telco and edge cloud business unit, helped incubate VMware’s telco network functions virtualization work and led VMware in executing dozens of acquisitions as EVP of corporate development.

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