The metaverse may be one of the biggest developments of the coming decades, but that doesn’t mean the world is ready for it yet. In fact, according to Huawei it is the world not at all. The current telecom infrastructure needed to keep metaverse platforms running would have quite a few obstacles to overcome.
Metaverse is not ready yet
That writes Huawei’s strategic head Abhinav Purohit in a blog post. By way of illustration, the CEO gets a article from Maasai about the metaverse. You not only need metaverse software, but also cloud servers with expensive hardware, for example. According to Huawei, this infrastructure is anything but ready.
There would be three major hurdles to overcome. First of all, the latency of metaverse platforms is still too high, especially when the platform uses the cloud. It provides a delay of 75 to 150 milliseconds.
This should be much lower if you want to have a fluid experience in the metaverse. For a metaverse in virtual reality (VR), even a latency around or lower than 10 milliseconds is desirable. A lack of bandwidth is another problem. If a lot of people are in a completely online world at the same time, that requires quite a bit of bandwidth if you don’t want congestion in the network.
The quality of the experience is also important. Metaverses are criticized for often being similar to “ordinary video games” that actually already fulfill the same role. VR glasses are also still very expensive and uncomfortable to use.
Is 5G the solution?
Huawei proposes to use 5G techniques. This should provide metaverse worlds with enough bandwidth and lower latency by allowing the cloud servers to do the heavy lifting. Then you immediately need less expensive hardware.
Of course, Huawei is the one who would love to provide this 5G infrastructure. It is itself a large telecommunications company. Whether Huawei will influence these metaverse platforms remains to be seen.