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AN ENGINEER’S VIEW OF THE METAVERSE | IEEE’S TOM COUGHLIN INTERVIEW

Dean Takahashi@deantak
December 22, 2022 6:30 AM
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Will we be able to build the metaverse?
Image Credit: Getty Images

Connect with gaming and metaverse leaders online at GamesBeat Summit: Into the
Metaverse 3 this February 1-2. Register here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Engineers are an interesting cross section of practical thinking and creative
vision. When you give them a problem like the metaverse to work on, they’re
going ponder it in a different way.

Science fiction writers and Hollywood creatives have done a good job painting
the vision of the metaverse. But the engineers are the ones who have to think
about building it. To get a flavor for the practical side of engineering the
metaverse, I talked to Thomas Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates and
president-elect of the IEEE engineering society.

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Fireside Chat: Next-Gen game development: new software services for creators
using game engines - GamesBeat Summit Next 2022

Coughlin is an IEEE Life Fellow and he has been providing market and technology
analysis services for more than 40 years. He has six patents and worked in the
data storage industry for 40 years. He has been consulting for the last 20
years.

Before starting his own company, Coughlin held senior leadership positions at
Ampex, Micropolis, and SyQuest. He is the author of Digital Storage in Consumer
Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is in its second edition. He is a
regular contributor on digital storage for the Forbes blog and other news
outlets.

EVENT

GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 3

Join the GamesBeat community online, February 1-2, to examine the findings and
emerging trends within the metaverse.

I’ve gone to many of the same events with Coughlin for years, and we talked a
bit about the upcoming CES, but most of our conversation focused on how to build
the metaverse.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

Tom Coughlin is president-elect of IEEE and founder of Coughlin Associates.
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GamesBeat: The metaverse would require a real-time internet. We’re not where we
need to be for that. When I think of where the internet needs to be, the best
thing that comes to mind is the Comcast announcement that they’re going to have
two-way 10G, and latency should be better as well. That latency is really the
thing that can kill online games. But on that front I’m curious whether you see
that kind of infrastructure coming into place in time for what everybody wants
so they can deploy a real-time metaverse.

Tom Coughlin: And at a price that people can afford. It’s going to take a while
to get that kind of experience. There are networking constraints. A lot of
metaverse stuff is based on wearable equipment, things of that sort. We have
constraints on battery life. A lot of the headsets, one to three hours is what
you get out of a charge. Unless you want to wear a backpack — people have
offered those backpacks. But it’s inconvenient. You look weird. You could
pretend it’s your ammo pack for a game, I guess.

A lot of the technology is coming together to make this possible. One of the
IEEE things, if we get down to that lower stack, can we come to some common
terminology? Can we develop some open standards for how you do this stuff? Make
it easier to accelerate the process of building that infrastructure to make
various types of extended reality experiences more real?

GamesBeat: There’s progress that needs to be made on so many fronts. But that
basic internet infrastructure has to grow up as well. There’s this problem that
people pointed out about — in some ways people suggest that a metaverse
experience, getting lots of people together in the same space, like a concert —
if you did an all-digital concert and people were individually interacting with
each other and they could hear each other with 3D audio and see that there were
10,000 people in there with them in a stadium, then that is a metaverse
experience.

I saw that demo by Improbable and the Bored Ape people, Yuga Labs. They have
something called Otherside. They did an experience like that with 4,500 people
in one space. It’s interesting that there’s some technology out there that could
get us beyond just 100 people in a space, which is what Fortnite does.

Coughlin: If you’re going to get any kind of resolution, anything that acts like
people would act, especially with a social element, your networking will be very
important. You’re going to need awesome networking capability if you’re going to
get hundreds or thousands of people together and have it act like real life.

Yuga Labs had a real-time demo of 4,500 players with 3D audio and full physics.

GamesBeat: What is the barrier there? Is it somebody’s law?

Coughlin: First of all, you have speed of light issues. If you’re further away,
you’re going to have built-in latency. If you’re on Earth, that’s generally not
that bad. The biggest constraint often is your local connectivity. Getting on
the big pipes from whatever little pipe you have. A lot of people still have
crummy internet hookups. Even in Silicon Valley, sometimes it can be sketchy
depending on who you work with.

GamesBeat: A lot of the people speaking about the metaverse are saying that you
have to include those people. You have to include not only VR headsets but
desktops and laptops and smartphones. People should be able to access the
metaverse through any of those things.

Coughlin: Which means you’re going to have to do some kind of compression. If
you don’t want to have horrible latency you’ll have to do an awful lot to make
it easier for people with limited 3G versus 6G connections, you know? You have
to do some compression. You have to make some compromises to get everyone on
there. There are a lot of technology factors. We have the technology to do this
to some extent. The ability to do that has a lot of growth ahead, especially —
the metaverse is supposed to be a social thing. To get that social element,
you’re going to have to handle a lot of different people coming in with a lot of
different connectivity and make that somehow work.

A digital divide or a network divide or a reality divide, whatever you call it,
between those with bad connectivity and good connectivity, it gives constraints.
If a lot of things move to the metaverse, from entertainment to education even,
then that’s another one of those; the people that have money can get the
connectivity that they need. The people who don’t have that money probably
won’t. They’re going to be dealing with whatever they can. What can you do about
that to make it more equitable and get more people to be able to be part of
whatever this modern economy is going to be?

GamesBeat: If you look at that one problem, right now a lot of games can get 100
or 150 people in an instance, in one world where they can interact with each
other. If we take that leap to where we want 1,000 people, what’s involved in
making that possible?

Coughlin: And all interacting. The more people with simultaneous exchanges
possible. It almost goes up — complexity probably goes up to something like the
square of the number of participants. It’s at least that. Maybe even a higher
power. The more people you have, the more connections you have, the more
communication that might be going on. That complexity then puts a lot of
pressure on the infrastructure to support getting those people in there.

GamesBeat: There’s a reason we’ve been stuck at this limit for many years now.

Coughlin: I think that’s part of it.

GamesBeat: The other way the Epic Games people were good at expressing this was
something they called “the sniper and the metaverse.” You put a sniper in a
stadium filled with people, or just up on a mountain or something, and they
could scope in on one individual and take a shot. But you don’t know who they’re
going to target.

Coughlin: Only the sniper knows.

AleXa’s virtual concert could be a forerunner of the metaverse.

GamesBeat: You might have 10,000 people visible to the sniper [like in a Hitman
game], but only the sniper knows where they would go. You have to do that
instantly. The movement has to be synchronized. What they’re saying is that
crosses server lines. Usually you have a grid, a play space that’s handled by
one server. But if you have this distance where you can see for a mile, then
that’s probably going to cross multiple (servers).

Coughlin: The distance in the virtual space may not at all relate to distance in
real space.

GamesBeat: It was explained to me as: You would cross server lines if you were
having such a wide viewing distance. The servers usually were constrained in
some way such that they could only show a certain geography.

Coughlin: It depends on how they break up the computation.

GamesBeat: Any time you cross the line you would lose the real-time nature of
things.

Coughlin: If you’re going between one server and another, there’s going to be
latency built into that. As soon as you get communication out of one box,
there’s built-in latencies around that. Now, there’s a lot of technology coming
into play within data centers that may help a lot in the future. For instance,
one of the biggest consumers of energy and delays is moving data around between
memory and compute. Including rendering and things like that.

There are new technologies that could allow you (to do that) at data centers —
CXL is one of these. It’s an interface that allows you to switch network and
memory. I can pool memory. I can share memory between devices, build up virtual
machines, span multiple servers potentially, or create servers as I need them
with various resources, in this case the memory. I can have some direct connect
memory, and then I have a little bit of higher latency with shared memory.

One thing involved in that as well is the idea, can I compute closer to memory?
Then you reduce that delay and energy consumption moving data around. In the
equipment, at least in one data center, there are things going on that people
are developing, especially what they call computational accelerators–these are
located closer to the memory, where the data lives, and they can do certain
functions and offload the CPUs. These things should help reduce certain
latencies. I believe it would also impact things like games and metaverse
performance as well.

GamesBeat: It was encouraging to hear Intel talk at IEDM about how they don’t
think Moore’s Law is dead.

Coughlin: They’re doing all kinds of stuff. Chiplets. Getting finer
lithographies is getting more and more expensive. The lithographic equipment,
the extreme ultraviolet stuff, costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The next
generations are going to cost even more. They don’t want to use that in
everything. The idea of chiplets, for example, was I only use that where I need
that, which gives an advantage. This is all part of this disaggregation of
traditional server architectures, creating what they call composable
infrastructure, where I can build stuff up as I need it.

In this case, they’re deconstructing the chip — this is not programmable, but
they’re deconstructing the chip into little pieces. Then they put those on a
connected substrate. I can have some memory separate from my computation, but
close enough that I can get good performance. It gives me a lot more options. It
allows me to do more scaling. Also it’s more cost-effective than trying to do
everything with the high lithographic nodes. A lot of that stuff could impact
embedded devices. That’s where we’re getting into things that could be on the
network edge, or in the wearable devices.

Can we auto-generate art for the metaverse? Image source: Nvidia Research

GamesBeat: I was thinking that it would be a tragedy if Moore’s Law came to an
end right when we got to the metaverse.

Coughlin: Yeah. All of a sudden we can’t do anything for years. But no, I think
we’ll be able to address a lot of this stuff in a number of different ways. The
other thing is metadata, which is information about the stuff you’re moving
around, that you’re doing stuff with. That could be an important source for
optimizing network performance.

If I know something about how far something is, could I cache stuff up and do
things so that the latencies don’t appear to be as bad? If I’m playing a game,
can I have the game seem realistic and not pause? Even if it doesn’t have the
information yet, it does something that is in line with the nature of the game
because it understands the game. Can you do things like that, so that even if
you do have issues with your connectivity, you can build smarts into the system,
your game system, so it deals with that effectively, so it has the least impact
on the players? They still feel like they’re engaged. Things may not respond as
fast if you’re in Antarctica playing somebody in Greenland, but you can still
get a reasonable gameplay experience.

There are definitely physical constraints on things we can do. There are
technological constraints in terms of what we know how to do yet. But there are
also ways to mitigate that, things that could continue to let us have good
experiences with whatever infrastructure you’ve got, while we’re improving and
making the infrastructure better. We’re continuing with something like Moore’s
Law, only it’s not Moore’s Law anymore. We need more performance over time.
Faster responses and all this stuff. There are a lot of technologies going on
right now, spanning everything from networking to compute to computer
architectures to memory and storage.

Neal Stephenson and Dean Takahashi talk about turning science fiction into
reality.

GamesBeat: Are you optimistic about the metaverse, then?

Coughlin: Well, I’m optimistic about the concept of creating immersive realities
that extend what human beings can do. The metaverse, Neal Stephenson coined that
in Snow Crash, which is kind of a dystopian novel. Facebook grabbed on to Meta,
metadata and stuff. I think we’ll be having these kinds of experiences, whatever
you want to call it. New ways to extend reality. If it ends up being called the
metaverse or something else, I think that’s something that will be very
important.

That’s going to be involved in things like telepresence. I could remotely seem
like I’m somewhere else. It could even be with little robot things that roll
around. I see it at some of the convention centers. You have some space on a
tablet or something like that. Maybe more sophisticated versions of that down
the road. Could you make a human-like robot that could be somebody else for a
while in some other location so you don’t have to travel? Give you sensory
experiences that span the gamut of what we could do. Those are all
possibilities. It just takes a while to build the capabilities to do that.

Also, I think it will be accelerated by having standards that are underlying it,
especially if they can be open source. Allowing people to make things that will
work better together. No one outfit will be able to make this work. We can only
make it work as an industry. That’s where standards come in. There are
activities going on in IEEE that are trying to address some of that.

GamesBeat: As far as CES goes, it looks like we’ll hear a lot about the
metaverse there.

Coughlin: Oh, I think so. CES is always interesting. There are things that make
sense and things that don’t make sense. One place I really like is Eureka Park.
It’s sort of the cheap seats. You find startups and people like that. It goes
all the way from the silly to the sublime in terms of the things you find there.

GamesBeat: I don’t know where we are on the semiconductor or electronics content
in cars now.

Coughlin: It’s over 50% of the cost of the car, I think, at this point.
Especially when you get into the electric vehicles.

GamesBeat: KPMG is now saying that they expect automotive to drive semiconductor
revenues in the next year, in contrast to wireless communications. Wireless,
with smartphones, just seems so gigantic. I didn’t realize that automotive had
any chance of surpassing it.

Coughlin: Automotive was really hit by the chip shortages. When they started to
order stuff again they found out that–the thing about automotive is they go
through this really rigorous qualification. Once they qualify chips, and
anything else, they want to keep getting them for decades. The problem is that
technology like semiconductors doesn’t stand still. Ten years — it’s more like
mayfly years, the life of the technology. You get these old nodes, and there are
very few places they can make it. When they decommit it and they want to get it
again, some of the sources aren’t available anymore.

Automotive is responding to that. I think they’re trying to get more modern
technologies where they can. They still have all the safety stuff they have to
do. That limits what you can do. And there are a lot of semiconductors being
built. Some of that is going to be supporting automotive. Automotive is
certainly not the biggest driver, but it’s going to be a significant driver for
the next few years.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
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GamesBeat: I don’t know if you’ve listened to a lot of Jensen Huang’s talks, but
there’s an interesting bridge that I see between enterprise and games through
something like the Omniverse. He was saying that they’re going to use the
Omniverse to build the digital twin of the earth, the Earth 2 simulation, so
that they can really predict climate change for decades to come. They would
apply all the world’s supercomputers to this problem and try to simulate the
earth with meter-level accuracy, so they could have the most accurate
forecasting possible. And then I asked him, “Does that mean you get the
metaverse for free?” And he says, “Yes, you get the metaverse for free.”

After designing this in the Omniverse, it theoretically then should be reusable.
If some video game people out there want to create a planet-size world and
auto-generate a lot of it, they couldn’t come up with enough artists in the
world to create these things that they want to create. They would rely on
generative AI for a fair amount of it. But if they’re getting this handed to
them for free and it’s reusable, then that makes the metaverse so much easier to
implement.

Coughlin: It’s really a commoditization of technology, which is a long-term
trend. A lot of new tech is first implemented in data centers, places that can
spend higher amounts of money that’s brand new. They can get economic value from
it. As that technology matures and you do more of it, it gets cheaper. That’s
the general trend. Most technology gets commoditized.

If you look back, some of the stuff we’re calling the metaverse, these
technologies like heads-up displays and virtual reality, they’ve been around for
decades, but they’ve been extremely expensive. The Air Force uses it for pilot
training, for pilots to be able to know what’s going on. If it costs a few
million dollars, it’s still a fraction of the cost of a fighter plane, and it
makes it work better. If you do more of this stuff, you make more of this stuff,
the cost goes down, and then that allows it to become commoditized. More people
can access it.

It’s the other Moore, Geoff Moore, his statement. You get something that gets
enough of these niche applications to where it can go into high volume. Then the
costs go down and it becomes commoditized. There’s a very good chance that all
the things that come together to make what we might call a metaverse or some
kind of extended reality are going to go down. It’s going to become a part of
everyday life in the not too distant future. Ten years?

GamesBeat: Some of that starts to feel like the space program. We got Tang. We
got Velcro.

Coughlin: Freeze-dried food!

Geoffrey Moore onstage at Demo Fall 2011

GamesBeat: The metaverse could lead to these unexpected benefits.

Coughlin: That’s true. The other thing, and other people have said this, is that
there will probably be new jobs and economic opportunities. We keep remaking
what it is that people do. More of that is going to happen. Data is like the new
oil, all these things that people glibly say, but it’s really true. All these
are tools for us to interact with each other and the world around us. It’s going
to be part of our economy. They’ll be important drivers.

GamesBeat: So you’re not in the camp of the curmudgeonly engineers who think
this is never going to happen?

Coughlin: Oh, it’s going to happen. It will probably be able to do more than
what we think it could, in ways which we can’t think of how it would do that.
People will come up with things to do with something. You mentioned the Bored
Ape Yacht Club. Who would have thought that would be a thing? That people would
pay that kind of money for stupid avatars of apes with yachting hats on? There
will be things we can’t anticipate. I guarantee that’s going to happen.

Meta Quest Pro on a charger.

GamesBeat: How soon do you think we can get great AR (and even VR) headsets that
are the size and shape of ordinary glasses?

Coughlin: To some extent there are AR/VR headsets that are close to the size and
shape of ordinary glasses.

However, the real question in terms of practicality and usefulness is how soon
can we get AR/VR headsets that look like — and hopefully weigh about — what
modern glasses do, with 4K resolution or higher, at high enough frame rate and
that can operate for several hours on a single charge while being affordable.

I estimate that based upon developments in battery technology and processing,
display technology and memory and materials, that it will take between 5 to 7
years for there to be a viable product (in high volume production).

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