Tips for Metaverse(5)

Tenet #5 – Support for nomadic computation Of all tenets proposed in this essay, this is the one that is most easily contested because it is motivated not by strict necessity but by the desire to create a network that is more than the sum of its parts. The same way that the web required a new way of thinking about information, the ideal metaverse requires a new way of thinking about computation. One of the ways this requirement manifests itself is by our proposal for the support of safe nomadic computation. In the ideal metaverse, a nomadic program is a fully autonomous participant with the similar “rights” of a human user. Like any ordinary user, such programs can move from one server to the next on the network. To the underlying computational fabric, there is no meaningful distinction between human operators and nomadic programs other than the fact that programs carry along their source code and internal state as they migrate to a new server. A powerful illustrative example of the potential for roaming programs is the approach taken by developer Hello Games in the development of “No Man’s Sky” [13]. By leveraging procedural content generation, a team of four artists have generated a virtual universe containing over 18 quintillion planets. Unable to visit and evaluate those worlds one by one, they resorted to the creation of a fleet of autonomous virtual robots to explore their many worlds. Each robot documents its journey and takes short videos of the most remarkable things they encounter to share with its developers. While Hello Games’ robot explorers are not nomadic programs, the same idea could be implemented in the metaverse on a much grander scale. For example, more than merely visiting worlds in the network, nomadic programs can also interact with other users or programs, improve the worlds visited [14] or even act as the autonomous surrogate for a user who is currently offline. Moreover, the infrastructure required for supporting nomadic computation can also be leveraged to offload work to the computers utilized by human visitors. This is beneficial because thousands of end-user machines running complex logic can create much richer experiences than what would be possible with server-side resources exclusively.