Intel Senior VP Raja Koduri says powering the so-called metaverse will take much more powerful machines than we have today.
Writing in a blog last week, Koduri reasoned that we’d need to see “a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art” to power “persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time”. Guess a Meta Quest 2 won’t do, then.
Now, in fairness, Koduri is envisioning a high-end version of this platform with lifelike avatars and environments that mix our reality with virtual elements, but it’s still a sobering statistic.
In specific reference to Intel, Koduri said that the company is looking to upgrade three key areas: intelligence, ops and computer. Intelligence refers to a “unified programming model and software development tools”, ops covers “the infrastructure layer that delivers compute to users beyond what is available to them locally”, and compute simply means the actual raw power needed to run the platform.
Even today, though, we’re seeing the beginnings of what some hope will be a full-blown metaverse on several platforms. Social VR apps like Rec Room and VRChat let users create their own avatars and worlds to explore, whilst Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect its ambition to make the platform a reality in the years to come. It also has its own line of Horizon apps that cover different elements of social VR.
Whatever work may be happening today, though, Koduri’s words suggest we’re perhaps decades away from seeing something that truly resembles a persistent online metaverse.
