Networking and the Metaverse — MatthewBall.vc

So even though its objective isn’t necessarily competitive in nature, we should think of the Metaverse as raising the requirements for all aspects of networking — latency, reliability/resilience, and bandwidth — to that of AAA multiplayer games. It doesn’t matter how powerful your device is (see hardware and compute) if it can’t receive all the inf... See more

This last point is key. If we want to interact in a large, real-time, shared, and persistent virtual environment, we will need to receive a superabundance of cloud-streamed data. 

Many gamers think this is what happens in all online multiplayer video games. But, in truth, most game services send only positional data, player input data (e.g. shoot, throw bomb), and summary-level data (e.g. players remaining in a battle royale) to individual players. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator works by storing a core amount of data on your local device (which also runs the game, like any console game and unlike cloud-based game-streaming services like Stadia).

Bandwidth is commonly thought of as ‘speed’, but it’s actually how much data can be transmitted over a unit of time.

The three core areas of networking — bandwidth, latency, and reliability — are likely to be the least interesting Metaverse-enablers to most readers. However, their constraints and growth shape how we design Metaverse products and services, when we can use them, and what we can (and may never be able to) do.