Much Ado About the Metaverse But What About the Digital Infrastructure Behind it?
We are hearing quite a bit about the potential of the metaverse, an interoperable digital economy and landscape that has the potential to change how we work, play, interact, learn, and much more. At its core are virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, but as Wired commented, “doesn't require that those spaces be exclusively accessed via VR or AR.” They went to add that, “A virtual world, like aspects of Fortnite that can be accessed through PCs, game consoles, and even phones, could be metaversal.” The metaverse will also bring new functionality, like the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance and motion-tracking tools.
As The Wall Street Journal noted, already “Accenture PLC created its own virtual-reality environments for training courses. Eventually workers will be able to enter VR to practice giving managerial feedback to an AI bot or visit an oil rig for simulated training.”
We are in the early innings of the metaverse and if technology developmental timelines hold, we will see several competing versions emerge with consolidation to follow. Hopefully it will be more akin to the internet that can be accessed through any browser rather than stand-alone platforms that we’ve come to know across smartphones, PCs, tablets, and gaming consoles.
What gets us excited here at Tematica about the metaverse is what it means for our Digital Infrastructure & Connectivity theme. In keeping with the Virtuous Circle that powers that theme, we see a substantial increase in data consumption and creation with the metaverse that will drive an explosion in demand for data centers and the equipment they house as well as networking equipment and even faster connectivity and lower latency. As Phillip Marangella, CMO at EdgeConneX, recently wrote:
“The infrastructure to support a concept as bold as the Metaverse cannot be limited to a small number of physical locations. It needs to be extensive even as it needs to feel local and exhibit ultra-low latency…the changes needed for a true, global Metaverse will require more, faster evolution, effectively re-architecting the Internet with a greater recognition of processing, storage, and networking that will require a global fabric of edge data centers.”