The Metaverse is acknowledged that it “may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile”.

Intel says that the world does not have nearly the computing power that’s needed to drive such a virtual experience. In fact, we are not even close.

Intel Senior vice president, general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja Koduri, said that there needs to be several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors.

“To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades”, he noted.

  Koduri appositely explains that it’s even a challenge to put two people in a convincing virtual space.

“Consider what is required to put two individuals in a social setting in an entirely virtual environment: convincing and detailed avatars with realistic clothing, hair and skin tones – all rendered in real-time and based on sensor data capturing real-world 3D objects, gestures, audio and much more; data transfer at super-high bandwidths and extremely low latencies; and a persistent model of the environment, which may contain both real and simulated elements. Now, imagine solving this problem at scale – for hundreds of millions of users simultaneously”, Koduri said.

 “Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real-time, will require even more: a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art.”

 Koduri noted that hardware improvements alone aren’t going to narrow this gap. Software and algorithm improvements will have to pitch in, and hopefully, we will have enough to sustain an immersive metaverse experience in about five years.