(2021-06-29) Ball Compute And The Metaverse

Matthew Ball: Compute and the Metaverse. Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, sees the next step for immersive simulations as something greater than more realistic explosions or street races. Instead, it’s the application of the “laws of particle physics, of gravity, of electromagnetism, of electromagnetic waves, [including] light and radio waves … of pressure and sound”. And just as the virtual world is augmented, so too will be the ‘real’ one.

In totality, the Metaverse will have the greatest ongoing computational requirements in human history

It was only by the mid-2010s that millions of consumer-grade devices could process a game with 100 real players in a single match, and that enough affordable, server-side hardware was available and capable of synchronizing this information in near real-time. Once this technical barrier was broken, the games industry was quickly overtaken by games focused on rich UGC and high numbers of concurrent users (Free Fire, PUBG, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, Roblox, Minecraft).

And these games then quickly expanded into the sorts of media experiences that were previously ‘IRL Only’ (e.g. the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite, or Lil Nas X’s in Roblox).

‘more concurrent users’ isn’t the sole demand on our computing devices. We want our characters in Fortnite to have more customizable items than just an outfit and a backpack.

The ability to participate inside a virtual concert, rather than just attend one from a largely uninteractive, roped-off area?

human history shows that additional computing power always leads to advances

There are a few different schools of thought when it comes to addressing our ever-expanding need for compute and its relative scarcity

One is to concentrate as much simulation-processing as possible in the cloud, rather than on local computing

Another thesis suggests that we’re better off betting on advances in local compute, rather than remote supercomputers that must then contend with unreliable networks

Here’s an example that shocked me earlier this year. From December of 2020 to March of 2021, Genvid Technologies (Disclosure: portfolio company), operated its first major ‘MILE’ (or Massively Interactive Live Event) on Facebook Watch

Rival Peak doesn’t fit the instinctive definition of the Metaverse

even in its nascent form, and without requiring meaningful consumer-side processing, it was running out of compute.

Just imagine what’s required for Nvidia’s vision of an interconnected mirrorworld.

OTOY’s Render Network

OTOY hit on the idea of tapping a network of idle GPUs by creating the Ethereum-based RNDR network and token. As an alternative to pricey cloud providers, customers send rendering tasks to a network of computers, paying their owners using the token.

Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse?