Pictured: From a 2014 Philip Rosedale presentation, in which he describes High Fidelity's goal of achieving "mouth to ear" latency in 100 milliseconds
Excellent reader conversation on my analysis of the networking section of Matthew Ball's analysis. My take is that the unbreakable nature of the speed of light will always hold us back from our ideal vision of the Metaverse. Or as I put it, "When it comes to the metaverse, Einstein is the ultimate cockblocker."
Longtime metaverse evangelist Ian "Epredator" Hughes proposed a cheeky solution:
This speed of light latency problem has me pondering quantum entanglement and instant changes at infinite distances.
Yes: Making the ultimate metaverse might require learning how to practically leverage quantum entanglement theory — i.e. a breakthrough in quantum computing that's readily available for consumers. (Which, while I'm not an expert, seems decades away, if ever.)
Fortunately Epredator proposes some more practical solutions that could be implemented now:
[J]ust as we now have AI doing upscaling of images or choosing what it thinks it needs to render before it does some element of forward prediction helps with latency mitigation. Kind of like games do already if packets drop they predict your next position (not always accurately but it’s a start).
Metaverse content creator Lex4art does a deep dive on the latency challenge, along with some potential solutions:
[T]here are some significant tech improvements needed even for "far from ideal full of compromises single country scale not metaverse but just a decent virtual world", like somehow start to mass-producing "vacuum fibers" (to have full light speed medium that allow 40-60ms latency coverage at least for US (and servers should be located nearby the geographical center).
Math is also the problem – even very coarse real-world alike physics for clothing on all characters, fleshy soft-bodies and decent destruction is out of the possibilities for math-based processors. So, we need something that I can call "context based processors" – e.g. like current CPUs run x86_x64/ARM/etc command set to process mathematical context those "context processors" will run special, non-math context command set. But there are not so much breakthroughs on that horizon – neural networks dedicated CPUs still math-based monstrosities, only abridged to the core for NN math operations range…
But something interesting can appear even at current gen tech – some types of virtual fun (like slowly building stuff in Minecraft) didn't need much latency, just hide delays smart enough way from user when he interacts with world and this works well already. World-scale virtual world also maybe not worth it – simply because language barriers/culture barriers makes person-to-person interaction not that interesting and quite clumsy. And if there are super cool virtual art was created in one distant country – maybe it will be enough to simply copy it and bring it to all other countries' data-centers to share at least art with good latency & content downloading speed… will see.
Oh, and how can I forgot about "cherry on top of the metaverse cake" – networking model for that kind of project is server-side-does-most-of-the-stuff so we can have secure payments and content distribution, no cheaters and no trespassing in VIP/personal zones. This is how Second life, Sinespace and World of Tanks build – but this also means 2x latency. You hit the movement key -> this goes to the server and it calculates movement amount/permissions -> returns to you result so to animate the character locally using received data. So, very limited amount of active metaverse activities for that kind of connection but this is the only way to do things secure.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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