How will infrastructure requirements impact the metaverse’s evolution?
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The evolution of bandwidths might eventually get there but it may not. In startups, risk-taking is fundamental to what we do. Not everything will be successful, but we are always ready to say, "Good try — onto the next thing." For better or worse, Facebook and Zuckerberg putting tons of money into the metaverse now at least gives it some direction, wherever it may go. It's driving a lot of effort.
The infrastructure requirements are interesting: How is networking going to work in the metaverse? Because I looked at seven layers of the technology, and I can't imagine how you would have multiple metaverses that you have to traverse given the amount of bandwidth that's going to require. I still haven't found technology that will compress video so easily and so well in low bandwidth.
When we have these discussions, rather than focusing on what's technologically possible and not possible today, I look at where the next generations are spending their time. I toyed with gaming, but wasn't a gamer. I’m more of a social being, but I also realize I'm quite different from my 11-year-old niece in terms of how much time she’s willing to spend with a screen. People are engaging more and more in those virtual spaces, almost to the point of excluding other things. Gaming has become a competitive sport with an audience. That means part of the population is headed there and will be looking for new experiences, so there's money to be made.
There are things to learn from that in the enterprise, but the question is: will it be the consumer companies that drive that experience, or will it come from more traditional corporate backgrounds? Because corporations are highly difficult to change. You know it by the number of startups we continue to have. If corporations could change faster, we probably wouldn't have as many of them. A lot of change happens through mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
If you look at 5G and where wireless is headed, it's going to be a convergence of two sets of bandwidth, but it’s not clear that it will get us to the volumes required to realize metaverse technology. So when it comes to the bandwidth question, unless there's some major innovation in video compression, the incremental value that you’re getting from each next generation isn't that high. While it looks very different from the way it did in 1970, I don't know how much better it's going to keep getting.