The road ahead of Metaverse

The five tenets of the ideal metaverse shared in this article can be succinctly distilled to just two adjectives — free and distributed. Those are precisely the attributes that made the web widely successful, and the core values the metaverse must embrace to achieve a similar level of cultural relevance. However, there are still many significant challenges ahead for the creation of a real-world metaverse. From a hardware perspective, nothing short of a collapse of technological progress stands in the way of the required technologies being made available. Computing and networking performance continue to increase exponentially [16], and affordable head-mounted displays are just around the corner. From the software standpoint, there are a few groups already mobilizing to fulfill the promise of the metaverse. I have previously introduced our team at Lucidscape, and I feel compelled to mention our amazing friends at High Fidelity since they are also hard at work building their own vision of the metaverse. Similarly noteworthy are the efforts of Improbable.io, even though they are developing proprietary technology, their work could be useful to the metaverse in the long run Overall, recent progress has been encouraging. Last year our team at Lucidscape ran the first large-scale test of a massively parallel simulation engine where over ten million entities were simulated on a cluster composed of 6,608 processor cores [19]. Meanwhile, High Fidelity has already released the alpha version of their open source platform for shared virtual reality, and as I write this, there are 44 domains in their network, which can be earnestly described as a proto-metaverse.