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1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote a short story titled “Pygmalion’s
Spectacles,” about the invention of magical VR-like goggles that produced a “movie that gives one sight and sound
Baudrillard described hyperreality as a state in which reality and simulations were so seamlessly integrated that they were indistinguishable. Though
Roblox’s core users are the very children who grew up “iPad Native.”
“Metaverse as a regulatory strategy” theory,
live video streams, such as those of CNN or Twitch, are substantially less reliable than on demand streams from Netflix or HBO Max.
The challenge with BGP is that it was designed for the internet’s original use case of sharing static, asynchronous files.
BGP follows a fairly standardized one-size-fits-all methodology for routing traffic, which essentially weighs the shortest path, the fastest past, and the cheapest path (with a general preference for the last variable).
Concurrency is one of the foundational problems for the Metaverse, and for a fundamental reason: it leads to exponential increases in how much data must be processed, rendered, and synchronized per unit of time.
mainframe era, which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, the dominant computing operating systems were those of “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs,” typically defined as Burroughs, Univac, NCR, RCA, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric.
forum where emojis articulate more than typed words.
Snapchat saw mobile communication as being image-first and the front-facing camera on smartphones as more important than the more frequently used (and higher-resolution) back camera,
In 2021 alone, over $16 trillion was settled through blockchain/cryptocurrency networks, which to many experts are foundational enablers of the Metaverse (more on this in Chapter 11). Visa, as a point of contrast, processed an estimated $10.5 trillion.1
“yesterday’s supercomputer is today’s PlayStation.”
markets that require really powerful computers are very small in size,
The markets are so small, it [sic] can’t afford very large investments. That’s why you don’t see a company that was founded to do climate research.
Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has argued that the dominant business model of the internet era has been breaking down anything made of atoms into bits—what was once a physical alarm clock on a nightstand is now an application inside the smartphone on a nightstand, or just data stored on a smart speaker nearby.
In a simplified sense, the Metaverse era can be thought of as involving the use of bits to produce 3D alarm clocks made of virtual atoms.
Roblox, for example, doesn’t need to cloud stream much data because most of its in-game items are based on “pre-fabs.”
You can think of “bandwidth” as the number of lanes on the highway, and “latency” as the speed limit.
The human threshold for latency is incredibly low in interactive experiences.
avid gamers become frustrated after 50 ms of latency (most game publishers hope for 20 ms). Even casual gamers feel input delay, rather than their inexperience, are to blame at 110 ms.3
the median time for data to be sent from one city to another and back again is 35 ms.
Rollback netcode is more sophisticated. If an opponent’s inputs are delayed, a player’s device will proceed based on what it expects to happen. If it turns out the opponent did something different, the device will try to unwind in-process animations and then replay them “correctly.”
Subspace has found that an average 10 ms increase or decrease in latency reduces or increases weekly play time by 6%.
Latency is the greatest networking obstacle on the way to the Metaverse.
“We are in a constant battle with the speed of light. But the speed of light is and will remain undefeated.”
The physics of the universe only beat the target minimum for competitive video games by 10%–20%.
glass fibers, unlike the vacuum of space, reflect light.
The result is a more than 45% elongation of a route. This brings us to 58 or 65 ms
BGP serves as a sort of air traffic controller for data transmitted “on the internet” by helping each network determine which other network to route data through.
As such, it “helps” by applying a fairly standardized methodology which mostly prioritizes cost.
why it takes more than four times longer for the average data packet to travel from NYC to Tokyo than a particle of light, five times longer from NYC to Mumbai, and two to four times longer to reach San Francisco, depending on the moment.
that, fiber optic cable is much less “lossy” than light transmitted through the atmosphere, especially during cloudy days.
Culling, occlusion, and LOD solutions are essential to real-time rendered experiences because they enable a user’s device to concentrate its processing power on what the user can see.
Game A can never use all of a given Nvidia GPU’s power, that spare cannot be assigned elsewhere.
Microsoft’s electrical power plant is really just a network of single-household power generators, rather than a single, neighborhood-sized one.
Shifting computing resources into the cloud creates many new costs.
“Sweeney’s Law”—improvements in local compute will continue to outpace improvements in network bandwidth, latency, and reliability—seems likely to hold.
The most impressive aspect of Roblox Corporation’s flywheel may be its investments in R&D.
That means 30 cents of every dollar spent on Roblox went back into the platform.
Roughly half of all games today run on Unity, while Unreal Engine’s share of high-fidelity 3D immersive worlds is estimated at between 15% and 25%.
Video games are not designed to “maximize GDP.” They’re designed to be fun.
The best example of “economic gravity” comes from the game engines—the very companies pioneering the plumbing of the Metaverse.
“AAA” is an informal classification for video games with large production and marketing budgets and which usually come from the largest video game studios and publishers. It is similar to the “blockbuster” designation in the film industry.
Many experts believe 120 Hz is the minimum threshold for avoiding the risk of disorientation and nausea.
Yet Mark Zuckerberg has said that “the hardest technology challenge of our time may be fitting a supercomputer into the frame of normal-looking glasses.”
Many new smartphones also feature new ultra-wideband (UWB) chips that emit up to 1 billion radar pulses per second and receivers that process the return information.
country’s more than 30 million small-to-medium businesses employ over half the workforce and are responsible for half of GDP (both figures exclude military and defense spending).
blockchains and cryptocurrencies as the first “digitally native” payment rail and the solution to the problems plaguing the current virtual economy.
