Moderated by Carl Roberts, partner at Hadaara Consulting, featuring panellists Jezzibell Gilmore, chief commercial officer and co-founder of PacketFabric; and Mark Cooper, VP of edge strategy at AtlasEdge.
Conversations started with Roberts asking his panel, how the metaverse will impact both connectivity as well as edge design and implementation.
Describing video games as the most developed use case of the metaverse, Gilmore commented: "If you have latency when using things like virtual reality, it causes motion sickness. I have a 10-year-old I don't want him being sick in my living room with the Oculus," she joked.
"But who is going to develop the physical infrastructure, because the infrastructure itself requires upgrade in the last mile."
As for edge she noted that "edge requires investment" adding that this investment will impact not only the metaverse but real-world assets such as real estate and local economies, "who is going to be responsible for that?"
Decentralisation remains the key change maker for the enablement of the metaverse and in order to make this a reality, Cooper says "we need to reverse that trend [of historically centralising as networks scale]".
"We need to change the way that we do interconnection. We can't have everything centralised; we're going to have to decentralise the infrastructure. We're going to have to do traffic handoff much deeper within countries, which requires investment in infrastructure and a big change in architecture."
Gaming continues to be the biggest monetisation opportunity for the metaverse, comments Gilmore especially as the other use cases continue to be defined.
"The people who are benefiting from it first depends on the use case. About three quarters of the use cases today is gaming and entertainment. I heard Meta say they intend to have the Oculus Pro to become personal computer replacement, where we will be working with virtual or mixed reality devices."
