One foundational thing we always knew is that for what we imagined in Snow Crash, what we imagined in Ready Player One, for those experiences to be delivered, the computational infrastructure that is needed is 1000 times more than what we currently have.
So the [personal computers] are getting better, the phone is amazing these days, you’ve got a two-teraflop GPU [graphics processors] in the phone… and then you have cloud. There’s lots of progress made, but it is not enough.
Your thesis is that there’s a lot of hype around the metaverse, who’s going to build it, and what’s going to look like. But before we get to that, chipmakers need to build the infrastructure layer.
Yes, exactly… What I have been in pursuit of for the last five years is preparing the computational framework necessary for the metaverse. You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses.
We’ve been working in the background on the roads and highways and the train lines you need, assuming this civilization is going to happen. When roads are being built it’s exciting but after that, nobody cares about it. And that’s where we want to get to. Once this is all built, you’ll have your fun in the metaverse.
Why is this the first time that Intel is talking about the metaverse publicly?
Because the first building blocks—the high-performance graphics—are within a few months of launching. Before it was speculative. If we started talking about stuff that is still a year-plus away, it’s like, ‘Too much PowerPoint!’ We will start rolling out in 2022. But this is a four- or five-year journey to get everybody to have access to better, faster compute. We’ll be laying out their first set of roads, if we use that analogy, next year and actually have launches coming up in early [2022].
What is what’s Intel’s vision of the metaverse? Is it one cohesive space? Is it a series of different metaverses?
We envision it as multiverses that may be connected to each other with accounts or something like that. One version of the metaverse I personally aspire to is the ability to have this conversation that you and I are having in a full immersive environment where I see video of you and you see a video of me and it’s photo-real, maybe beyond photo-real. Maybe it’s the Superman version of Scott, but where we can interact and collaborate with people across the world in more three-dimensional reality. That’s one I’m banking on—kind of Zoom on steroids.
The other one is gaming experiences where we are having fun, earning points, and doing quests. Then there is the social stuff that that is beyond just kind of having a meeting. It’s a continual social space with avatars and creators. Being able to have people collaboratively work on things, but they’re all remote. You don’t have to be physically on location to create stuff, whether it is the creation for storytelling or movies or even physical objects. It’s a wealth of possibilities.
Gaming creation, collaboration, social—they all can have different metaverses. And they may connect, but we see the underlying technology framework as being common.
The path to the metaverse