By Bill Barney, CEO of Turbidite
Posted on The Tech Capital
Highly anticipated, wildly imagined and nowhere near its potential impact on the world we live in, metaverse is the latest technology concept that keeps tech companies and entrepreneurs chasing to unravel its true potential.
Imagine a future in 3D metaverse where technologies merge to integrate our physical and virtual worlds into a new reality. A real-time digital world where complex surgical procedures may be delivered virtually with global medical expertise; manufacturing and maintenance can be simulated for precision troubleshooting; and where 3D virtual shopping centers enable real time interactive customer experience.
Still in its infancy, development of the metaverse digital ecosystem will be much more complex and chaotic than we can imagine. At the very foundation, metaverse demands not only new hardware and software, but a sophisticated digital infrastructure, in order to develop, operate and grow!
The making of metaverse…
Moving life into this new paradigm is still somewhat beyond our imagination in terms of the magnitude of impact metaverse will have on the global economy. The world is scrambling to unravel how metaverse could change the way we do business, travel, shop and, in general, live! Metaverse, while still a concept, is a foray into our tomorrow where we will find a highly interactive virtual world where everything happens in 3D, real time!
The making of metaverse will be the next major evolution of the Internet riding on IPv6, Web 3.0 and beyond, while further leveraging AR, AI, blockchain NFTs and other digital commerce equivalents. It will soon enter a stage involving complex collaboration of economies and businesses to ensure boundaries and security measures are put in place to navigate and protect as metaverse grows. We also need to anticipate regulatory roadblocks and embrace sustainability concerns which may pose additional challenges to the very existence of metaverse.
Big Tech and operators today are scrambling to anchor into visions of this virtual world and figure out how to collaborate in order to build and evolve. In a bold move to state their view of the future, Facebook even changed its company name to Meta! Yet Dan Rabinovitsj, Vice President of Meta Connectivity recently commented, “making the metaverse a reality will require significant advancements in network latency, symmetrical bandwidth and overall speed of networks. No single company, or industry, can do this alone. Creating the metaverse will require a global effort.”
In other words, while tech companies, entrepreneurs and investment communities are trending on “everything metaverse,” this virtual world is still in evolution stage. The core of turning metaverse into reality is where tech companies, along with cloud and infrastructure services providers, must step up innovative measures to deliver new levels of infrastructure and significantly higher quality performance. The physical foundation of metaverse requires high bandwidth, ultra-low latency networks, data centers and processing power, all with full scalability to optimize and deliver complex computing at the edge while meeting new sustainability standards.
”Making the metaverse a reality will require significant advancements in network latency, symmetrical bandwidth and overall speed of networks. No single company, or industry, can do this alone. Creating the metaverse will require a global effort.
Dan RabinovitsjVice President of Meta Connectivity
The mission-critical edge…
According to the World Economic Forum, we are entering the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” which “represents a fundamental change in the ways that we live and work. It is a new chapter in human development… merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds and fusing technologies in ways that create both promise and peril.”
That said, today’s network infrastructure, not to mention all the legacy systems, are nowhere near ready to support this anticipated digital world of tomorrow which requires continuous real-time, secure interaction between potentially millions of servers aligned with user devices. The push to optimize more sophisticated cloud-centric applications and workloads is fueling the growth of edge computing and edge data centers.
In its Worldwide Edge Spending Guide, IDC forecasted edge computing spend in 2022 to reach $176 billion, a 14.8% year-on-year growth which is expected to sustain at this pace through 2025, reaching close to $274 billion.
With metaverse’s requirements for distributed interaction across multiple platforms, it needs edge data centers to enable high quality computing and connectivity solutions instantaneously to optimize end users’ experience. These edge facilities literally need to be everywhere, at every corner of the world, to deliver the real-time virtual metaverse that big tech and others are in the process of building.
As metaverse enthusiasts create this new digital world where users enter a virtual space through an avatar or progressively more realistic interfaces, it must be grounded in the physical network infrastructure that enables the delivery of the AR/VR experience that matches the real world that we live in. The foundation lies at the edge – virtualized compute and storage, distributed infrastructure within data centers close to the end users!
As our world continues to advance in the creation of metaverse and in the adoption of new digital platforms across businesses, media, education, research and healthcare to name a few, the play is at the edge! Edge data centers are mission-critical in delivering high quality user experience in our digitally transforming world today, tomorrow and beyond!
Back to Insights & Press
