Metaverse as a Service: Megascale Social 3D on the Cloud

We present a vision for the future of an emerging category of cloud service: the metaverse of 3D virtual worlds. Today, hundreds of millions of users are active daily in such worlds, but they are partitioned into small groups of at most a few hundred players. Each group joins a different virtual world instance, and players can only interact in 3D with others players in the same group during that session. Current platforms are designed in ways that simply cannot scale much further, and solutions from other cloud services do not generalize to the more interactive, bidirectional, and latency-sensitive interactive 3D domain. We outline some of the technical challenges that currently stand in the way of a metaverse without inherent technical limitations on the number of users in a shared experience. We argue that, although these obviously touch on many other areas of Computer Science such as computer graphics and numerical simulation, the core challenges lie squarely within the systems domain.