As the foundational technology for metaverse, a cloud infrastructure can unleash metaverse’s true promise and help it grow. To learn about the five critical elements cloud offers metaverse and how it is impacting enterprise strategies and the future, read on.
Metaverse holds the promise to transform the way we create, consume, and communicate information by integrating virtual, augmented, and physical realities in a world where users can engage and gather immersive experiences.
Technology pioneers are betting on this multi-billion-dollar industry that can offer experiential engagement to digital customers. With a potential growth rate of more than 50% by 2030, it is considered the technology of the future.
From redefining the hybrid work model to modernizing product payment systems and innovating experiences at speed and scale, metaverse has found applications most everywhere across all enterprises. It has evolved from only being accessible through Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to becoming directly available through smartphones.
“The metaverse is here, and it’s not only transforming how we see the world but how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting room.”
– Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft
The metaverse’s foundation
But what enables metaverse to create synced avatars that can interact in real-time with such ease? Which underlying technologies integrate to create the virtual existence of our physical realm?
Beneath this world of enhanced user experience and engagement lies the core of all the new-age order – the cloud. Metaverse seems to be a natural use case of cloud adoption. Its ever-expanding universe of existence demands resources that can support its growth.
Moreover, cloud can exhibit its true potential to be purpose-led with the expansion of metaverse. Thus, with the underlying requirements of accessibility and connectedness, a cloud-native infrastructure can unleash metaverse’s true promise.
Five critical elements that cloud offers metaverse
Cloud caters to the metaverse in the following ways:
- Scalability: Metaverse requires a similar experience for several concurrent users. Distributed cloud computing allows easy interactivity and accessibility through on-demand computing power, storage, and networking capabilities. Underlying flexible architectures allow constant scaling and user expansion. Hyperscalers have already recognized their role and are creating technology stacks to enable metaverse
- Efficiency: Creating an open metaverse system requires a powerful underlying infrastructure that can combine complicated virtual environments into a single ecosystem. Being complex and compute-intensive, more innovative ways to leverage infrastructure are needed. Hosting environments must not only store and immediately process huge data streams but also maintain similar operational levels at all times. With a hybrid and distributed cloud environment, metaverse applications can seamlessly access enormously powerful processing resources. Cloud services providers are continuously providing optimized cloud environments based on adopting metaverse applications
- Interoperability: Metaverse provides an interconnected virtual environment where users can find new means to engage and access content. This opens new opportunities for monetization with virtual and physical synergy. Interoperability in metaverse requires standard protocols, homogenizing multiple data structures, and output streams to converge for a seamless experience. Cloud-enabled open metaverse architecture has embedded interoperability principles empowering users to port their identities into a shared digital ecosystem
- Real-time experience: Providing real-time experiences to millions of concurrent users requires low latency levels. Latency is directly related to decision-making in the virtual environment. Also, latency reduction helps remove cyber-sickness (similar to motion sickness), which is prominent in VR usage. Cloud delivers believable experiences through dispersed points of presence, and with edge cloud, service providers can boost computing powers and improve response time. Edge computing thus plays a vital role in providing high-quality rendering in real-time
- Cost-effectiveness: Consumers need Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) glasses to have a truly immersive experience in metaverse. Even entry-level versions of these equipment pieces are relatively expensive because of inbuilt hardware. Offloading compute to edge cloud infrastructure can potentially lower the costs and increase the feasibility of the systems
Metaverse’s impact on cloud strategies
Industry players have recognized the cloud’s pivotal role in the metaverse space. Social media companies, game developers, and technology vendors have begun to meaningfully invest in strengthening their cloud infrastructure.
The race to embrace metaverse is changing future cloud adoption strategies in such ways as:
- Increased hybrid cloud adoption – Adopting a hybrid cloud to host enterprises’ metaverse entities will improve the speed, availability, reliability, and scalability of metaverse environments
- More secure cloud investments – Financing is essential for the operations and to build native applications to leverage the power and capacity that cloud offers
- New edge computing appreciation – This architecture can help alleviate performance and connectivity challenges
- Increased custom-built cloud solutions – Enterprises are favoring this approach, which can accelerate their metaverse adoption, such as AR cloud
Metaverse adoption outlook
We expect enterprise leadership to increasingly push for metaverse adoption to meet evolving internal objectives or changing environmental dynamics. Transforming the underlying infrastructure to be metaverse-ready is the first – and most critical step – for enterprises embarking on this journey.
For more details on metaverse adoption, see our Metaverse Primer: What Is It and Where Can It Be Used? To discuss leveraging the cloud to have a metaverse-ready infrastructure, contact [email protected] and [email protected].
You can also watch our LinkedIn Live session, Trust and Safety (T&S) in the Metaverse, to learn risk mitigation strategies for challenges that could arise when taking on metaverse initiatives, and implications for the third-party T&S services market.