Moderator: Carl Roberts, Hadaara Consulting partner. Panellists Jezzibell Gilmore (chief commercial officer and cofounder of PacketFabric); and Mark Cooper (VP of edge strategy, AtlasEdge).
Roberts began the conversation by asking his panel how the metaverse would impact connectivity and edge design and implementation.
Gilmore described video games as the most advanced use case for the metaverse and said: “If there is latency in using virtual reality, it can cause motion sickness.” She joked that she has a 10-year old son and doesn’t want him to get sick in my living area with the Oculus.
“But who’s going to build the physical infrastructure?”
She also noted that edge requires investment. This investment will have an impact on the metaverse as well as real-world assets like real estate. “Who is going to be responsible?”
Cooper says that the key to enabling the metaverse is decentralisation. Cooper also states that “we have to reverse this trend.” [of historically centralising as networks scale]”.
We need to change how interconnection is done. It is impossible to centralize everything; we must decentralise infrastructure. We will need to handle traffic transfer much more deeply within countries. This will require infrastructure investments and significant architectural changes.
Gilmore comments that gaming remains the most lucrative area for metaverse monetisation, especially since other use cases are still being defined.
The use case determines who benefits first. Gaming and entertainment account for about three quarters of all the current use cases. Meta stated that the Oculus Pro will replace personal computers and allow us to work with mixed reality and virtual reality devices.