[Coinlive Talk] Building the Metaverse of the Future

• Solid infrastructure is required to provide the rendering power necessary to power the metaverse
• The metaverse challenges the way we view our own bodies, by offering an alternate philosophy of cybernetics and a digital body
• A powerful chip, algorithm, and database is essential for generating ‘intelligence’ that will bring humanity forward

First coined in 1992 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, the term “metaverse” has captivated many for decades, especially with the advent of novel blockchain technologies that promise unprecedented levels of immersion and social engagement in a virtual realm. Games like Roblox, The Sandbox, and Meta’s Metaverse have been in the spotlight over the past few years, with Meta even announcing a new VR headset to be released later this October.

Despite these exciting announcements, many of us are still uncertain as to what goes into a metaverse – what does it do, and what is required to support it? To find out more about the infrastructure and ethos of the metaverse, Coinlive spoke with Marvin, the Chief Scientist of iPolloverse.

“The metaverse is defined by quantity,” Marvin tells us. “Where traditional games only allow for a few hundred users on its servers, the metaverse supports the ability for up to 10 million avatars to work and interact together.”

Yet facilitating such an immense world that encompasses an astronomical number of users requires both proper infrastructure and development direction, as Marvin says.

“This system requires infrastructure targeted at real-time rendering,” he says. “In addition, this rendering has to be supported by data centres and servers that are located within geographical proximity. You can’t expect a server that is too far away from you to support this type of rendering.”

Indeed, just as Marvin says, real-time rendering software is not only important for the metaverse to support its immense player base and immersive virtual environment, it is also an important tool that has allowed metaverse designers to change design iterations, edit lighting, and test materials.

Enter iPolloverse, a decentralised rendering platform dedicated to the metaverse. Being a decentralised network, it encourages the contribution of computing, storage, and networking resources all across the world to support the metaverse in a permissionless way. In fact, it is this organising of resources that has precisely allowed iPolloverse to ensure that metaverse users all across the world to gain access to infrastructure that is not only geographically situated within their proximity, it has also given a new lease of life to computing hardware, especially after The Merge.

The Merge, which saw the Ethereum network transition from a power-guzzling Proof-of-Work consensus protocol towards a Proof-of-Stake network, sent tremors throughout the crypto industry as mining on the Ethereum mainnet would no longer be possible. This left many miners clueless as to what to do with their expensive GPUs and hardware.

“There’s been a lot of GPUs that have been idle, especially after the merge,” Marvin explains. “We allow for the pooling of resources so that this hardware can be better repurposed into real-time rendering tasks instead of just mining”

This infrastructure is especially important not only to support the running of the metaverse however, as Marvin tells us. Having a reliable rendering framework that is decentralised also allows for the creation of better 3D NFT standards that can promise interoperability between metaverses. He tells us that where 2D NFTs are mostly aesthetic in nature, 3D NFTs can have the ability to reshape our mindsets on utility, especially when it comes to exchanging NFTs between metaverses.

Coinlive’s Interview with Marvin, the Chief Scientist of iPolloverse

Indeed, it would be nigh impossible for an NFT on The Sandbox to, say, adopt a new lease of life in Meta’s Metaverse, precisely due to the centralised nature of both platforms. A decentralised rendering platform that is able to generate NFTs for the metaverse may be the answer to this problem, as Marvin theorises.

Beyond infrastructure however, Marvin also suggests that the future of the metaverse is largely hedged on altering our mindsets for future development. On a base level, he espouses that the metaverse has the ability to reshape the way we think of typical B2C consumerism. Where traditional marketing focuses on people, product and the place, Marvin says that operating on the metaverse has changed this standard to introduce a new parallel: of Avatar, NFT, and Game. In the metaverse for instance, we no longer operate as individuals with a corporeal form with a tangible body. Instead, we are represented by Avatars, that while serve as proxies for our real world “selves”, do not necessarily obey the same laws.

“You can change specifications in the metaverse to adjust your avatar’s tangibility accordingly,” he says.

“You have the ability to decide, for instance, what can pass through your body and what can’t. What we may conventionally understand to be real to us in the real world may not be as ‘real’ within the metaverse”.

Indeed, what Marvin alludes to here is the theory of information and cybernetics, that has allowed for the transcendence of the material substrate of the human being by rethinking it into terms of information flows. Even outside of the metaverse, cybernetics has allowed for the human body to be altered to altered with technological hardware. Marvin argues that to conceptualise the future of the metaverse would be to recalibrate the way we observe our own physical body, and open up the possibility of its multi-dimensional reconstruction within the virtual environment. In the metaverse, the body becomes a communication interface between the real and the virtual world.

He also suggests that at the core of the advancement of the metaverse lies the pursuit of intelligence. With web3 or the ‘new world’ of blockchain technology largely focused on the development of emerging technologies such as smart contracts and AI, Marvin tells us that the pursuit of constructing intelligence has become all the more significant.

“There is a trifecta towards the construction of intelligence,” Marvin tells us. “Amassing more data, developing a powerful chip, and creating advanced programming algorithm will form the key towards creating intelligence.”

Building the metaverse of tomorrow then, requires not just the proper hardware and infrastructure; it also requires us as individuals to embrace its advent and its significance in our path towards the future.

“The metaverse will allow us as humans to reshape the way we think,” Marvin says. “As we create better and more intelligence, it will allow us as humans to transcend our physical limits, and in turn generate new forms of intelligence.”

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Readers should take the utmost precaution before making decisions in the crypto market. Coinlive is not responsible or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the article or for any damage or loss to be caused by and in connection to it.