The Metaverse is considered the next evolutionary stage of the internet. However, where this already requires enormous IT services in its current form, the web of tomorrow will make significantly higher demands in every respect.
Ever since it was "activated" in 1993, the Internet has been one of the most important drivers behind the further development of IT - and is therefore today responsible for a wide variety of superlatives that even experts can hardly imagine. For example: How much data the Internet contains in total can only be estimated. Ex Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt put it at five million terabytes – or five billion gigabytes.
In 2021, the global web also brought it up a total energy consumption of between 580 and 800 terawatt hours. These values are distributed among the consumption of the data centers, the data transmission itself and crypto mining. For a better comparison: In the same year, Germany produced and consumed as a whole around 500 terawatt hours of electricity.
Various companies, including Meta Platforms (including the parent company of Facebook), are now preparing to create a new Internet, the Metaverse. And although only the smallest preliminary insights are currently (February 2023) possible, one thing is already certain: In terms of IT and energy requirements, this next Internet will overshadow everything that has come before.
Metaverse: A portrait of Web 3.0
To explain why the Metaverse will usher in an era of new performance superlatives, it is first necessary to explain what this web is all about.
What we've known since around the early 2000s is Web 2.0; even if this term has not been used that often for a number of years due to the long existence of this Internet.
The central feature: The user of Web 2.0 applications is largely in the real world. He interacts (in contrast to Web 1.0, where only consumption was possible) with the Web mainly via screens, cameras and classic input devices. Most of the content is optically two-dimensional in nature - for example this text.
The Metaverse, short for Metaversum (Meta lat. "beyond"), to keep the version numbering, represents "Web 3.0" in this sense. It is, so to speak, the evolutionary connection of
- classic internet,
- video gaming and
- immersive techniques and media.
In principle, one can think of the metaverse as imagine a virtual, three-dimensional universe. It consists of different rooms. The user dives into this with the help of an equally virtual avatar.
The Metaverse should also work on classic display devices one day. However, the larger focus is on an immersive overall virtual experience. Using various virtual reality techniques, the user should be able to move around the Internet in a similar way to, for example, a first-person video game.
Online shops, for example, would look like a virtual shop that can be explored via avatar in the Metaverse. Jobs could be represented in a similar way. Naturally, Web 3.0 will no longer be so text-heavy, but will instead focus on other visual and verbal communication of information. The goal is to create a veritable digital parallel world in which users no longer recognize so easily that they are accessing it from the real world - just as immersive as possible. Ultimately, this results in the need to use significantly more powerful IT than that for which Web 2.0 is sufficient.
IT will become more hybrid
When the metaverse leaves the development phase, everyone will be able to participate in it just as is the case for the operators of classic websites today. The requirements in this area have already increased enormously today - simply because, among other things (but not exclusively) today's Internet makes such demands.
More and more companies are therefore currently setting up a system combining different factors in the form of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). Simply put, it is a combination of traditional data center, networking, computing and management on a software-centric architecture that leverages both on-premises and cloud services. In particular, the Azure Stack HCI from Microsoft is well known in the IT world.
Such solutions will become even more important for the Metaverse. Because only they allow a corresponding performance without escalating costs with a greatly increased scalability. This means that an HCI can easily grow with the demands.
The graphical processing will increase enormously
Graphically, Web 2.0 is rather unspectacular. Much of all content is entirely text-based, or at least relies heavily on the written word. The multimedia processing with other media between graphics and videos is usually much less spectacular than is the case in a halfway contemporary video game.
This will be one of the points at which the Metaverse will differ particularly strongly from the previous Internet: In order to meet the requirement for maximum immersion, there will be no other option than to make this web graphically much more spectacular.
currently like this in terms of graphic design, they are still not very sensational. In the coming years, however, the metaverse will in many places resemble the spectacular graphics of modern video games or CGI effects in films much more.
This, in turn, requires one thing: an extreme amount of graphical computing power. These worlds must be built and rendered on the part of the "website" operators with appropriate power. Of course, they must also be displayed on the user side. On the other hand, the already high demand for graphics cards will increase again sharply. This will also be accompanied by a need to address the issue of energy consumption.
Even high-performance smartphones only last a short time when they display graphically complex applications. If immersion in the virtual world is to be more than just a short dive or limited to stationary computers, manufacturers will have to think about more powerful batteries - with developments in the field of e-mobility definitely doing important groundwork.
It won't work without AI
The Metaverse will live from creating an environment that is as realistic as possible, at least in terms of image and sound. However, it will not stop there. For example, different types of haptics could be added. Physical phenomena such as gravity or movements also have to be calculated here – in real time.
It will therefore not be enough simply with more and more powerful graphics cards. We are talking about computing power that is several powers greater than what has been used on the web up to now. Above all, the dimensions are the challenge here:
The virtual rooms will not only be visited by a few hundred thousand people (like in a popular video game), but in case of doubt by millions at the same time. Facebook, for example, is currently doing it to almost two billion visitors in one day. Google processes approximately 100,000 searches every second of an average day.
Such dimensions in connection with the virtual representation can only be solved by using artificial intelligence. For example, the basic design of the worlds, whereby human designers then only give this basis a "human touch".
The data highways must become much more efficient
Of course, data must also be transmitted between the user and the provider in the metaverse. If you now imagine that for a ten-minute video clip in 4K resolution, around 1.5 gigabytes of data have to be transmitted, you can guess what the Internet connections of tomorrow will bring.
A typical German broadband connection is currently being used transfer around 275 gigabytes of data – per month. In view of the much more complex design of the metaverse, these values should easily increase tenfold in the future; if not more.
Last but not least, this is an enormous challenge for everything between the house connection and the large backbones of the global data channels. The topic for copper lines is much more difficult. Their transmission capacity is clearly limited at the top.
Fiber optic lines, on the other hand, can be made significantly more powerful without touching the lines themselves. To put it simply, this is done by simply clocking the light signals higher. Since these signals travel down the line at the speed of light, there is still a lot of upgrade capacity left until multiple signals are injected one after the other so quickly that no gaps would remain.
The server farms are becoming even more gigantic
At the beginning it was already explained how much energy today's Internet consumes. In a world where Web 3.0 is the definitive standard (but most likely will not be the only Internet landscape), this will become even more so.
Because, among other things, it is naturally necessary to store the much more comprehensive data here on servers that are just as disproportionately large - it doesn't matter whether it's local systems or cloud servers. Various companies are already preparing for this tomorrow, but it is not yet known when it will start.
02/21/2023