Guest Comment to the Metaverse: Can Virtual Reality Be Our Reality?

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The digital environment is changing every day. Ideas like the Metaverse that once seemed like a futuristic fantasy are now being realized and integrated into our daily lives. Ideas may be there, but is our technology really ready to go meta? Michelle Stark, director of sales and marketing for domain and hosting provider Fasthosts, talks to experts to find out.
The Metaverse is best defined as a virtual three-dimensional universe that brings together many virtual places. It allows users to meet, collaborate, play games and interact in a virtual environment. Often viewed and accessed from the outside, it’s a hybrid of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), but it’s so much more.
These technologies are simply external entry points to the Metaverse and provide visuals that allow users to explore and interact with the environment in the Metaverse.
It’s the “outside” part, if you will, and it’s also enhanced with AI and 3D reconstruction. These additional technologies help create realistic objects in the environment, computer-controlled movement, and avatars for games and other metaverse projects.
The most important technology on which the Metaverse is based is blockchain. A blockchain is essentially a blockchain that contains certain information (which is amazing). They are a collection of interconnected computers rather than a central server, which means the entire network is decentralized. This provides the infrastructure for developing and storing data for Metaverse projects and makes them Web3 compatible. Web3 is an updated version of the Internet that will integrate virtual and augmented reality into people’s daily lives.
Sounds like a lot, right? It includes many technologies that are foreign to most of us. So, is technology an obstacle to the widespread adoption of the Metaverse?
According to Jonathan Hunt, senior creative technologist at Wunderman Thompson, the technology just doesn’t exist. However. “How ready the technology is for the mass adoption of the metaverse depends on how you define the metaverse, but if we’re talking about the vision of the future that the big tech companies share, it’s not there yet,” he said. “The infrastructure that powers the Internet and our devices is not ready for this kind of experience. The best shared/simulated spaces we currently have are usually very expensive and run entirely in the cloud, like something like Nvidia Omniverse Mainframe computers, cloud streaming or gaming, they rely heavily on instantiation and localized packages. Consumer equipment, especially the XR, is not ready for everyday day-to-day use and is not ubiquitous.”
Hunt added: “The technology in this area looks like an evolution of the above systems, which means more distributed infrastructure, better access and newer hardware. accepted in the future remains questionable.”
Blockchain is the “back end,” if you will, where the magic happens. This will be the key to the growth and development of the Metaverse. There are many elements that make up a blockchain and enhance its benefits and uses, such as storage capabilities, data security, and smart contracts.
Due to its decentralized nature, blockchain storage capacity far exceeds the capacity of the centralized storage systems we have today. Since data in the Metaverse is stored in exabytes, the blockchain works by using unused hard drive space on the network, which prevents users in the Metaverse from running out of storage globally.
More precisely, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes. That’s a huge amount of storage, and it doesn’t just live in the cloud – it has to go somewhere – and the physical storage of the servers means the earth is busy and energy is consumed.
Hunter said, “How long can the rope be? One day the entire Metaverse will be hosted on servers and in data centers, but the amount or size needed to house all that storage will depend entirely on how the Metaverse is received by the masses.” The big players in the space are starting to build vast data centers — Meta is buying a $1.1 billion campus in Toledo, Spain, to house their new Meta labs and data center, for example — but storage isn’t the only thing these power guzzlers need. Calm! All this information – albeit virtual – still needs a place.
Hunt added: “The rise in electricity prices around the world at this time could pose challenges for the growth of data centers and housing across the virtual universe. Will we one day see entire islands dedicated to storing data in data centers? Solely to store the metaverse? 1984″, but who knows?”
While blockchains provide instant authentication of transactions through digital wallets, our physical form will be represented by avatars that visually represent who we are and how we want to be seen.
Lars Seijer Christensen, founder of Saxo Bank and chairman of the Concordium Foundation, said: “I think if you are using a basic blockchain based solution that requires an ID at the entry point, it is actually quite simple and can be used automatically for the appropriate purpose.. It is also very secure and transparent as it will link any transaction or interaction that requires an ID to a trackable record on the blockchain.”
Once identities are established, it may indeed become easier to assess the creditworthiness of parties buying and lending in the Metaverse by digitally identifying and storing each person’s data and transactions on the blockchain. However, while this sounds exciting, it is necessary to consider how this affects privacy and how this data is recorded on the blockchain.
This setup also has huge security benefits. Through reliable data processing and the use of validating nodes, a decentralized blockchain helps to eliminate third-party interference and data leakage, such as theft and manipulation of files. Both are responsible for verifying and recording transactions on the blockchain. This is reassuring to many, given the widespread concerns about data privacy and user protection in the Metaverse.
In order to access the blockchain, we only need an internet connection and a device such as a laptop or smartphone, and this is what makes it so great because it is so easily accessible. However, we rely on a completely different set of technologies to support the blockchain.
Akash Kayar, CEO of Leeway Hertz, a web3-focused software development company, expressed his opinion on the readiness of currently available technologies: “The Metaverse is not yet fully mature in terms of development. Technologists are working on strategies and testing various technologies to develop Ideas for more viable and interesting Metaverse projects for the world.”
Cajar continued, “Projects such as Decentraland, Axie Infinity, and Sandbox are all popular modern Metaverse live projects. The people behind these projects have made excellent use of well-known Metaverse technologies, from blockchain and cryptography to NFTs.
Kajar concludes: “According to leading tech futurists, many new technologies will empower the Metaverse in the future, which will support the development of a rich set of use cases that enhance the Metaverse’s ability to deliver real-world functionality. The Metaverse promises to provide extreme opportunities for businesses and ordinary users, so it will determine the future of digitalization.”
While cryptocurrency is only considered legal tender in two countries, it is a reality for now and it is likely that it will eventually become mainstream. However, the Metaverse may not have reached the same level of maturity yet, meaning that cryptocurrencies may have to wait before they can finally take off completely.
There is no doubt that cryptocurrencies and the metaverse will go hand in hand, as the former will be the currency of the latter (still with us?), each of the existing metaverse platforms uses its native currency, for example, Decentraland uses $MANA for payments. and shopping. However, due to the volatility of cryptocurrencies and the recent crash of the FTX trading platform indicating security breaches, we may not be ready to transition to decentralized payments just yet.
Each of the largest data centers in the world can contain tens of thousands of IT devices requiring more than 100 megawatts of power—enough to power approximately 80,000 US homes (US Department of Energy, 2020), which is about 1,350,000,000 dollars per data center. the average cost of MWh is $150.
According to Hitachi Energy’s Nitin Pareja, the electricity needed to process bitcoin is higher than you think: “Bitcoin consumes about 110 terawatt-hours per year. That’s about 0.5% of the world’s electricity production. This estimate takes into account the total computing power used. for bitcoin mining and transaction processing.” Using this estimate, we can calculate that the annual cost of bitcoin energy is about $16.5 billion.
However, some large companies are gradually turning to renewable energy to power their projects in this area, and Google is signing a deal to invest in wind and solar energy worth almost $2 billion to power and transform its data centers in the future. Amazon followed suit, becoming the world’s largest buyer of renewable energy.
However, they may still have plenty of time to implement their ecological processes, as Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that the creation of the Metaverse would take almost a decade. “I don’t think it will get really big until the second half of this century, at the earliest,” Zuckerberg said.