How many people remember the last time the idea of a second world was the hot topic of the moment? It was not that long ago. In fact, the last time this idea was in vogue it was in the final stages of the 1990’s dot com boom. People have been speculating about this for a long time. These days, author Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash is cited as the originator of the concept, but even he will concede he was not the first (note: Snowcrash is still a great book, worth a read). Editor’s Note: Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries. The best visual portrayal of this virtual world can be seen in the 1994 Michael Douglas/Michael Crichton film “Disclosure”. (note: Disclosure is not a good movie, and not worth a view.) For those who suffered through it, the virtual reality world at the heart of the movie’s “plot” is painfully cumbersome. And of course, there is the classic website Second Life, which did a lot of what today’s metaverse proponents talk about (albeit in lower-res). All of this is a long way of saying that the idea of the metaverse has been around for a long time, and that we have not gotten there yet can be laid down to two chief reasons. First, replicating the real world in some form of digital simulation may not be the best way to organize digital activity. At the peak of last year’s metaverse frenzy, Walmart garnered a lot of online shade for their VR shopping demo.
“VR will not leak real until they learn to put some dirt in it” - Laurie Anderson A second problem is that the technology is just not there yet. We wrote about this years ago in 2016 (and later in 2019). And while the industry has made some advancements since then, they still have a ways to go. There are really two flavors of metaverse – the fully immerse world of virtual reality (VR) where the user wears headgear and all images are digitally generated; and the world of Augmented Reality (AR) where users where a pair of glasses that present a digital overlay on top of the real world. Admittedly, the industry has made considerable progress with VR. Most people find that Facebook/Meta’s Oculus is a great product. There is a fair amount of software available for it, and uses cases have broadened beyond gaming to include remote work desktops. And while most people who spend the day working behind VR goggles need a day to re-adjust to reality, it does seem that VR has made real advances. By contrast, AR is still a work in progress as it presents serious technical challenges. For instance, the compute and battery for AR glasses still need a great amount of miniaturization. Most implementations we have seen are either unwieldy or limited in functionality.
Placing a digital overlay on top of a real world image is incredibly difficult. The graphics have to refresh quickly enough to allow for free movement of the head, otherwise the lag creates nausea as users see two out-of-sync worlds simultaneously. This requires immense graphics processing – for which see above regarding miniaturization. It also requires very high bandwidth, low latency data connections. This last part is probably why we hear so much about the metaverse personally. From our position entrenched deep in the telecom networking world, the solution to this bandwidth/latency problem is 5G! The telecom operators and especially their equipment vendors are grasping at any opportunity they can to extol the virtues of 5G (which are otherwise fairly limited), and many of them have grasped AR fiercely. Unfortunately for them 5G is only part of the solution, the other technical challenges and the required software and content are just not ready yet. We still think all these things will come some day, but the metaverse is many years away. Also read: The Metaverse: What Is It, and Why Should You Care?
