Connecting the Metaverse: In-Network Computing as Infrastructure
Ubiquitous virtual reality environments such as Metaverse have been described as the future mobile Internet, alluding to their expected profound impact on the way how information is retrieved, processed, rendered, and consumed. While detailed designs are still emerging, early visions such Keeichi Matsuda’s Hyper-Reality project have already outlined usage models and expectations on connectivity and data availability to enable rich interactions with the physical world and blending it with dynamically computed artefacts.
Metaverse systems will challenge traditional client-server-inspired web models, centralized security trust anchors and server-style distributed computing. The new network will be based on dynamic interactions between humans, the phyiscal world, and computing processes in an edge-to-cloud continuum. This talk will outline the associated challenges, review recent work in distributed computing and suggest some approaches for evolving networking and computing to enable Metaverse – not as a dystopian vision but as an opportunity for societies and their citizens.