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Will Metaverse be NextG Internet? Vision, Hype, and Reality
Ruizhi Cheng, Nan Wu, Songqing Chen, Bo Han
TL;DR
The Metaverse is widely treated as the NextG Internet, but discussion has emphasized potential while technical requirements and practical challenges remain to be examined. The article reviews industry positions, defines requirements, surveys social VR, and compares Workrooms with AltspaceVR to identify challenges and opportunities.
Problem
Industry and academic discussion has focused on Metaverse potential, motivating examination of its technical requirements and real platform behavior.
Method
The article reviews industry positions, presents technical requirements, surveys social VR platforms, and compares the network operation and performance of Workrooms and AltspaceVR.
Results
The comparison finds that both platforms face scalability issues, while AltspaceVR uses less bandwidth and processes uploaded data before forwarding it.
Takeaways & Limitations
Future Metaverse development should address scalability, bandwidth accessibility, interoperability, portability, and latency between users’ motions and others’ perceived reflections.
Takeaways & Limitations
Effectively addressing crime-related risks in a decentralized Metaverse remains an unresolved issue requiring in-depth study.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Metaverse, with the combination of the prefix "meta" (meaning transcending) and the word "universe", has been deemed as the next-generation (NextG) Internet. It aims to create a shared virtual space that connects all virtual worlds via the Internet, where users, represented as digital avatars, can communicate and collaborate as if they are in the physical world. Nevertheless, there is still no unified definition of the Metaverse. This article first presents our vision of what the key requirements of Metaverse should be and reviews what has been heavily advocated by the industry and the positions of various high-tech companies. It then briefly introduces existing social virtual reality (VR) platforms that can be viewed as early prototypes of Metaverse and conducts a reality check by diving into the network operation and performance of two representative platforms, Workrooms from Meta and AltspaceVR from Microsoft. Finally, it concludes by discussing several opportunities and future directions for further innovation.
I. Introduction
The Metaverse is presented as an emerging, immersive successor to the Internet: interconnected 3D virtual worlds enabled by XR and related technologies. The article surveys its development, technical vision, prototypes, and networking realities.
- Metaverse development has historical roots in multiplayer virtual worlds such as text-based MUDs and later immersive platforms.
- Its current form is an open collection of Internet-connected 3D virtual worlds enabled by AR, VR, and MR technologies.
- The Metaverse is broadly viewed as a hypothetical NextG Internet, though no unified definition exists.
- Metaverse elements connect XR users, social events, user-generated content, NFTs, digital twins, AI, and the physical world.
- The article reviews technical requirements, industry advances, social VR prototypes, and networking performance in Workrooms and AltspaceVR.
II. Industry Trends
Industry participation spans social VR, shared virtual-world infrastructure, digital twins, games, and user-generated virtual environments. Alongside strong investment, some companies emphasize connecting virtual spaces with the physical world and improving real-world productivity.
- The industry review is summarized through Figure 2 and includes multiple high-tech companies entering the Metaverse arena.
- Meta treats VR as foundational to the Metaverse and has invested in social VR through Facebook Horizon and Oculus Quest 2.
- Nvidia’s Omniverse connects 3D worlds, supports collaborative scene creation, streams XR content, and integrates AI-trained digital twins.
- Epic Games and Roblox exemplify game-based Metaverse development through avatars, digital items, concerts, and user-created virtual worlds.
- Apple and Microsoft caution that seamlessly connecting virtual and physical spaces may be as important as the virtual space itself.
III. Defining Metaverse
The paper frames the Metaverse as an Internet-connected network of virtual worlds that should integrate virtual and physical environments. It identifies scalability, accessibility, and security, privacy, and legal issues as key technical requirements.
- The Metaverse is broadly viewed as a hypothetical NextG Internet connecting multiple 3D virtual environments through the Internet.
- Physical objects can receive digital twins whose states correspond with the real world, while Metaverse-side manipulation can change physical-world states.BMW used Nvidia Omniverse to construct a functional automobile-factory digital twin, reducing manufacturing costs and increasing productivity.
- Scalability: Scalability is a primary challenge because participant growth proportionally increases uploading and downloading demand, quickly creating platform bottlenecks.The authors report that Workrooms can hardly scale to tens of participants.
- Accessibility: Accessibility is constrained by cumbersome headsets, insufficient network bandwidth, and limited interoperability between Metaverse implementations.The paper envisions glasses or contact lenses replacing headsets and interaction extending beyond visual display.
- Security, Privacy, and Legal Issues: Security, privacy, and legal requirements include protecting authentication and biometric data, securing NFTs and digital twins, addressing immersive harassment, and establishing copyright and asset-portability rules.Portability and interoperability require both industry standardization and legal enforcement.
IV. Social VR Platforms
Social VR is presented as a major Metaverse component, enabling avatar-based communication and collaboration with spatial presence. The paper surveys eight platforms by accessibility, social, safety, entertainment, and real-world interaction features, then compares their user experience.
- Motivation: Social VR lets users interact as avatars, communicate, and collaborate as if they are in the physical world.The paper connects its expected demand to social needs and a sense of spatial presence.
- Key Features: The survey examines eight platforms across accessibility, avatar expressions, personal space, gaming, PC screen sharing, shopping, and NFT trading.The platforms are VRChat, Rec Room, AltspaceVR, Mozilla Hubs, Anyland, Cluster, Bigscreen, and Workrooms.
- Key Features: All platforms except Anyland support Oculus Quest 2, while facial expressions, game events, personal space, and PC screen sharing appear on about half.These results indicate varied design choices and development stages across the platforms.
- Key Features: Only Rec Room offers shopping and NFTs, showing that virtual trading is not yet widely available on social VR platforms.The survey treats shopping and NFT support as indicators of interaction with the real world.
- User Experience: The user-experience review highlights realistic lighting and live events in AltspaceVR, shared PC gaming and video in Bigscreen, and abundant games with cross-play in Rec Room.These examples illustrate differences in the platforms’ social, entertainment, and interaction features.
V. Case Studies
The case studies compare how Workrooms and AltspaceVR establish connections, exchange data, and perform under multi-user conditions. They find different bandwidth and audio-processing designs, while both platforms exhibit scalability or accessibility limitations.
- Case-study design: The reality check compares Workrooms and AltspaceVR because both support most surveyed features while representing early and recent Metaverse efforts.The comparison is intended to improve understanding of the state of the art.
- Workrooms: Workrooms uses two primary servers: one for virtual content and another for streaming or exchanging audio and video data.Its experiments found approximately 25 seconds of initialization, 2–3 Mbps downlink and approximately 0.6 Mbps uplink per user with two headset users.
- Workrooms: Workrooms’ downlink throughput increases linearly with headset-user count, and forwarding all users’ data through the server creates unnecessary communication overhead.The paper identifies this design as a scalability issue.
- AltspaceVR: AltspaceVR downloads 10–20 MB of event data and 300–500 KB of main-environment data before users enter an event, then exchanges user-related data over UDP.Only first-time event participants need the larger download.
- Network performance: AltspaceVR’s post-entry throughput stays below 0.06 Mbps with two users because event content is downloaded beforehand.Its custom UDP protocol uses a payload byte to distinguish data types such as audio.
- Network performance: AltspaceVR’s downlink bitrate rises almost linearly by approximately 0.03 Mbps when each new user joins, compared with approximately 0.5 Mbps for Workrooms.Both platforms therefore face scalability issues, but the increase is much smaller in AltspaceVR.
- Audio processing: Workrooms forwards audio without further processing, whereas AltspaceVR processes uploaded audio before forwarding it and usually delivers a lower downlink bitrate.The differing audio paths suggest server-side optimization in AltspaceVR.
- Accessibility and security: AltspaceVR supports nearly all VR headsets and provides personal space, while Workrooms supports only Oculus Quest 2 and lacks that harassment-protection feature.Neither platform offers shopping or NFTs, limiting current transaction-security concerns.
VI. Discussion
The discussion identifies bandwidth, latency, security, privacy, harassment, and ethical concerns as major challenges for building the Metaverse. It also outlines viewport-adaptive optimization and remote rendering as potential responses to scalability demands.
- Technical Challenges: Future full-body avatars for millions of concurrent users will demand more throughput than current social VR platforms, with photo-realistic real-time human models potentially exceeding 1 Gbps.Current platforms require relatively low throughput because avatars are usually upper-torso models controlled by handheld devices.
- Potential Solutions: Viewport-adaptive optimization can save bandwidth by transmitting only visible content, but crowded viewports still impose high transmission and rendering costs.The server must also predict the user’s future viewport to determine what content to deliver.
- Potential Solutions: Remote rendering can alleviate scalability by transmitting a rendered 2D video frame whose data volume is independent of the number of users.This approach shifts rendering tasks to servers, including when many users’ avatars are clustered together.
- Technical Challenges: Latency between a user’s motion and its reflection perceived by others is a key metric for immersive Metaverse experiences.XR headsets and haptic devices may require latency as low as tens of milliseconds.
- Technical Challenges: Security and privacy concerns include biometric identification data, digital twins, and other information requiring protection despite secure communication protocols on commercial platforms.The paper notes that biometric information collected through headsets could become a target of security attacks.
- Technical Challenges: Body movement-based harassment extends beyond text- and voice-based abuse, while existing personal-space features provide only passive protection.The paper calls for mechanisms that detect potential harassment before it occurs without harming user experience.
- Real-world Challenges: Cryptocurrency-related criminal activity reached $14 billion in 2021, underscoring unresolved governance concerns for decentralized Metaverse transactions.The paper links these concerns to blockchain’s decentralization and nonregulation and notes that real-world monitoring approaches may not transfer directly.
VII. Conclusion
The paper frames the Metaverse as a subject whose potential has outpaced established understanding, then combines conceptual analysis with measurements of social VR prototypes. It uses comparisons of Workrooms and AltspaceVR to identify technical challenges and future opportunities across multiple disciplines.
- VII. Conclusion: The paper reviews Metaverse hype, defines technical requirements, surveys social VR prototypes, and measures Workrooms and AltspaceVR to identify challenges and opportunities.It calls for further participation from networking, social sciences, economics, graphics, AR/VR/MR, HCI, security, and privacy research.