Above: "High Fidelity System Architecture"
Last week's post on which company is building a true metaverse was so provocative, Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale stopped by to post a reply:
Agree with others here that world-sized contiguous spaces with many people able to build together in then is the correct end-goal and definition of 'Metaverse' - that is the recursive architecture we are building, captured in this blog.
That's what we are building - 5 years work so far, going as fast as we can!
Remember whether you are talking about Dual Universe or High Fidelity -- tens of millions of SERVERS will be required to support the people in the space. So the big design here isn't just technical it is also economic in nature - there needs to be a motivation for everyone to work together and contribute servers. Roughly speaking, it will require about as many Internet connected PCs as we currently have worldwide to simulate/store/stream such a space. That's why we are also working on the blockchain-based currency systems.
He's talking about the High Fidelity concurrency stress test which started last week's conversation off. As to the need for millions of servers to build a true metaverse, this is why High Fidelity recently introduced its own stable cryptocurrency -- so we can pay each other to use our servers to make it possible:
[T]he design of High Fidelity allows domains (a virtual world or environment) to be of any size, with their internal regions partitioned to be serviced by many different servers, each with the capacity that we have been load testing. As you move around in those domains you will be switched from server to server, and those servers can be nested together into an architecture allowing distant sounds, people, or objects to be approximated by servers at higher layers in the tree. Additionally, servers can register to provide service for domains, and if you saw the servers restarting at our event you were actually seeing that tech in action — new servers being “hot-swapped” for the old. This will allow large groups of people to contribute their machines to each other to create enormous spaces for large communities. And our blockchain-based currency will allow people to pay each other for sharing their machines in this way if desired.
Much more here. The comparison with Dual Universe brings up an interesting point: Dual Universe (and also No Man's Sky) are simulated universes with emergent flora and fauna, resources that can be mined/farmed, gravity, ecosystems, etc. Shouldn't a metaverse worth the name also contain stuff like this? Otherwise, isn't it less a virtual world and more a 3D platform with no consistent underlying "world" beneath whatever the users bring to it?
More on that soon!
>> ...simulated universes with emergent flora and fauna, resources
>> that can be mined/farmed, gravity, ecosystems, etc.
>> Shouldn't a metaverse worth the name also contain stuff like this?
>> Otherwise, isn't it less a virtual world and more a 3D platform with
>> no consistent underlying "world" beneath whatever the users bring...
I think the trick is to provide templates and built in elements like this that can be easily selected as a basis for experiences along with interpolated water and blended matched land between more the detailed and user created areas.
Posted by: Ai Austin | Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 01:50 AM