While the world is ready for the Metaverse, the Leading chipmaker company Intel pointed out otherwise. Intel released their first statement on the Metaverse this Tuesday. And while Intel is a devotee in (what most people think will be) the future of how the virtual and real worlds could one day coexist, the company warns of a significant obstacle that could get in the roadmap of the Metaverse.
But while the chip company is excited about the possibilities of the Metaverse in the conceptual, Intel raises a vital issue with making it real. There’s not close to enough processing power to go around.
“One foundational thing we always understood is that for what we imagined in Snow Crash, what we envisioned in Ready Player One, for those experiences to be delivered.” An interview began with Raja Koduri (a senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group) from the quartz. But Raja quickly shows the upcoming problem of the Metaverse, saying, “The computational infrastructure needed is 1000x more than what we now have”.
The metaverse hype is in the sky and increasing. The craze is legit cause it’s limitless what you can do inside the virtual space like virtual meetings, games, live concerts, seminars, blockchain, and NFT-based integrations.
As shown on the metaverse introduction video by Meta (former Facebook), one can do all the things that which is possible, even impossible, in real life.
But the actual issue of creating Metaverse arent just the VR, AR development challenges, photorealistic graphics development (which, of course, is its own fight), or even the headsets and gadgets to reach there.
It’s in the computers and servers that run the vastly shared virtual worlds within the Metaverse that happen in real-time. It is constant across private platforms, allowing billions of people to work, play, or socialize in new ways. And here comes the drop of a reality check by Intel that today’s advancement in technology and computing power won’t be enough to make those dreams a reality.
From that speculation, full-fledged Metaverse won’t be happening anytime soon. According to Koduri, we can’t even put two people at once in a graphically detailed virtual environment. Think about what is required to put two people in the same space in an entirely virtual environment with a complex and realistic avatar with real-world like hair, clothes, expressions. All streamed in real-time based on the natural world environment, gestures, audio quality, and much more. Then data transfer at super high capacity and extremely low latency with constant bandwidth connection.
That is only for two people. Imagine how much computing energy it would take to cause Metaverse to feel like the Ready Player One Movie or Sword Art Online kind of experience. It would require much more computing power than now.
It would need to access petaflops (one thousand teraflops)of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses.
But thankfully, intel has been working in the background. Koduri added, ” What I have been in pursuit of for the last five years is preparing the computational framework necessary for the Metaverse. We have been working on the roads and highways and the train lines you need, assuming this civilization is going to happen.”
Cherish it or despise it, the Metaverse is arriving soon in the same form or another, and several versions of Metaverse already exist in the form of Roblox, Fortnite, etc. The fact that intel is thinking about is reassuring and a good sign. But according to Intel, there’s much more foundational work that needs to be done in the coming years.
