With a $199 sales price for "Santa Cruz", a standalone Oculus Rift viewer just announced, Facebook is back to being bullish about VR:
“We are setting a goal,” he said. “We want to get a billion people in virtual reality"... Some also say VR is isolating. “We all have limits to our reality, and opening up more of those experiences to all of us is not isolating,” he said. “It is freeing.”
Maybe so, though current Oculus owners sure seem trapped by the feeling someone's going to walk in on them while in VR. That aside, Linden Lab and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just pointed out one of the biggest back-end challenges to this 1 billion user dream:
1 billion people together in VR will require about 50 million servers. And not even Facebook is going to run 50 million servers.
— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) October 11, 2017
"1 billion people together in VR will require about 50 million servers. And not even Facebook is going to run 50 million servers."
Especially if those servers are meant to work and link all those 1 billion people together in a single shard. And indeed, High Fidelity has been working on this problem with a SETI at home-type solution:
High Fidelity’s architecture allows a single domain to be distributed across a group of networked server components, each of which manage different aspects of the domain environment and the functions needed to create a sense of presence for users.
Doing this in a trial last February, High Fidelity managed to run a 100 person event at a rate of $10.70 per hour plus another $6.40/month for storage fees. But what will be the costs to run a 1 billion person event, and will we ever have enough servers to make that possible?
Update, 9:30pm: Via Twitter, as expected Philip points to his vision of a fully distributed metaverse: "Yes: we will need a solution where people and companies run their own servers."
Yes: we will need a solution where people and companies run their own servers.
— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) October 12, 2017
Has anyone considered just how big the combined server farm is between MS, Google, Amazon, and Facebook just to power the cloud? Yesterday I took the rare opportunity to zoom out on Second Life's map. That's a crapload of islands and mainland all running 24/7. Why couldn't Facebook bring 50 million servers online?
Posted by: Joey1058 | Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 07:31 PM
Wait. Who said anything about it being mmo? You download a little room that is a promo for some company, you are alone there (besides any NPC's presence) and...uh, that doesn't take much back end. Just put it on google play and do some advertising. I think that would be their minimum, but maybe it's to dazzle and impress? That is all I see, promotion and buzz bandwagoning, I humbly guess.
But, nice opportunity to mention one's own company and product as well lol. So they are all doing it. Any clarification may get another article, re-tweet etc. Any news is good. Why mention "good news" and let people figure out what you mean, debate it in another article and then set them straight and get a third wave of tweets and attention lol.
Posted by: inthisboxgoesaname | Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 09:22 PM