Interoperability: Why the Metaverse Needs to be Cloud-native
Interoperability in the metaverse will enable the creation of richly interconnected ecosystems of virtual environments and supporting applications, giving users access to new and deeply engaging means of accessing content, monetization opportunities, and services.
The metaverse’s interoperability will make it possible to build interconnected ecosystems of virtual environments, giving users access to new and engaging means of accessing content, monetization opportunities, and services. Mimi Keshani, COO and co-founder of Hadean, discusses how companies, in particular, will have the chance to achieve never-before-seen synergies between our physical and virtual realities.
Interoperability in the metaverse will enable the creation of richly interconnected ecosystems of virtual environments and supporting applications, giving users access to new and deeply engaging means of access. For companies, in particular, there lies the opportunity to achieve unprecedented synergies between the physical and virtual domains.
In their ‘Value Creation in the Metaverse’ report, McKinsey & Co estimate that the value of the metaverse could reach $5 trillion by 2030, with 59% of surveyed consumers excited to transfer their daily activities to the metaverse. These figures go hand in hand; simply put, consumers will find and generate value in a metaverse that can act as a holistic platform for enriching their daily lives.
Nor is this an idea that exists only in the ‘metaverse’ niche. For example, IBM’s notion of The Virtual Enterprise stresses the growth and innovation opportunities in cloud-enabled ecosystems that create confluent acquisition channels between services offered by various companies on an open platform.
Greater interoperability is not a threat to companies trying to build walls around their processes and IP; rather, it will benefit them.
The rise of the internet allowed people to move numerous daily and professional tasks to one portal in web 2.0, but their activities remained diffused across ‘walled gardens’ tightly managed by their respective companies. In turn, the drive for decentralization and personal ownership has given rise to the new era of the internet known as web3.
The transition to web3 will greatly impact how the metaverse is built and adopted by consumers and businesses alike. The various worlds and platforms that comprise it will need to be able to work together, driven by the agency of end users. Achieving interoperability will be the journey to making the metaverse available to people as a digital reality, enabling users to carry their persistent sense of identity into shared digital ecosystems that integrate seamlessly with their physical lives.
The network effects instigated by interoperability in the metaverse will be irresistible, and transitioning to distributed models will be a foremost concern for most digital-native businesses in the near future.
A recent Metaverse Survey from PwC confirms that we are not alone in this, with 67% of surveyed business leaders already actively engaged in harnessing the metaverse, and a vast majority of them believe that it will be fully integrated across their businesses within the next 2-3 years.
See More: What Does Enterprise Metaverse Mean for IT/OT Convergence?
Hindrances from Legacy Technology
The metaverse and web3 are closely linked and used interchangeably, with decentralization playing an increasingly important role across digital finance and the web.
Legacy approaches used to build web 2.0 will find integration into this future difficult.
Many organizations wishing to go ahead with the transition to web3 find themselves hamstrung by complex intermediary solutions and spiraling DevOps costs stemming from the attempt to bring the advantages of distributed computing to applications that were not made for it in the first place.
Their metaverse worlds will be built and run through proprietary languages, restricting their reach and encountering constant ceilings around design and siloed content. Blockchain’s future role in the financial ecosystems of these worlds will be even harder to ascertain, with the centralized nature of these old approaches simply not being a structural fit with the decentralization shaping the future.
As the appetite for building interoperable ecosystems through distributed computing grows and extends to more complex and compute-intensive use cases like virtual environments, more powerful and innovative ways of leveraging cloud-native infrastructure must be adopted.
Harnessing the Power of the Cloud to Enable Interoperability
Interoperability is a collective challenge that requires agreement on standard protocols, data formats and economic paradigms that permit heterogeneous applications with very different data structures, functionalities, and outputs, to converge into a seamless experience for the end user.
This process first relies on the existence of infrastructure that makes interoperability the first principle. Facilitating flexible, open architectures allows for composability as well as for real-time streaming of updates and patches.
Frictionless, cloud-hosted ecosystems enable data to be shared between users and applications at real-time speeds, as well as providing applications with seamless access to enormously powerful computing resources to handle much of the processing involved remotely. This negates hardware imbalances on the client side and considerably increases the potential for user acquisition.
To further facilitate this, edge networking enables applications to be deployed and processed as close as possible to the end user, meaning much lower latency times and packet loss in the eventual transfer of rendered data to the client. By distributing information to edges with edge networking gateways, we can drive a persistent user experience in the metaverse, overcoming the latency issues that lie within web 2.0 infrastructure.
When such efficiencies are harnessed by applications built for the cloud from the ground up, the scalability of both the applications and their distribution becomes near limitless.
Leveraging the Principle of Interoperability
Whilst the potential strength of cloud infrastructure lies in the sheer amount and spread of the resources it affords to application developers, many companies find themselves limited by the tight vendor and environment lock-ins.
This stems from the inflexibility of the intermediary services being used to port non-cloud native applications to the cloud and forces companies to make crucial decisions in the choice between vendors or configurations, whether in terms of cost or availability, capacity, or service add-ons.
The resource pool required for fully realized interoperability in the metaverse is orders of magnitude higher than anything we have previously seen. It will certainly require the ability to consolidate the resources offered by various cloud environments into a convergent pool.
This is why, at Hadean, we are enabling developers to harness cutting-edge distributed computing capabilities from the ground up. Through this approach, it will be possible to achieve seamless interoperability and portability between applications and the cloud environments used to power them.
‘The metaverse’ will comprise a vast network of virtual worlds, each created independently and interweaved through common distributed infrastructure and SDKs. Enabling interoperability and decentralization at the infrastructural level will allow the metaverse and web3 to flourish into a vibrant and seamless ecosystem that touches every part of our lives.
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