More than one vendor I spoke with at the Virtual Worlds Expo last week mentioned that they were working through 'scaling' problems with regards to their datacenters. These were not only children or tween worlds for playing games, but also 'business virtual world' advocates.
I began to think about this a bit more on my ample airplane confinement last/this week and the thought occurred to me that this could present an Achilles heel to the growing use of virtual worlds within the enterprise. Bear with me, I am jet lagged as all hell and 1.5 intimidating-German-machine-espressos into my morning, so feel free to point out any blatant miscalculations or misconceptions I may write forthwith.
Look at Warcraft. They have nearly twenty datacenters worldwide. Why? Because they don't want people having a degraded game experience due to cross-ocean latency on the Internet, especially when that latency isn't manifested as just a dropped voice or YouTube packet or two, but the difference between a live level 70 elf and a dead one.
Now, Warcraft comes as a big-fat-DVD of pre-loaded code, little user-created-content to speak of (within a limited palette), and so they are sending coordinate data (what we used to call 'telemetry data') to players to pull down assets from their pre-loaded library. From a traffic perspective, pretty lightweight, albeit latency sensitive. In this regard, it is analagous to the old TN3270 Mainframe emulation code that we used to ship around indescriminately in 1992.
Fast forward to the office of the future, the virtual office version. You have packetized spatial audio. You have user created content. You have streaming video and powerpoints and presence information. You have ever-changing mixes of synchronous and asynchronous traffic types all over walls and tables of your virtual headquarters. This is much more bandwidth intensive than Warcraft, and if you are having a staff or funding meeting, the voice/video latency is arguably more critical than simple 'the dragon killed you before you hit it with your sword' telemetry data. The PowerPoints can be a little delayed without anyone complaining, admittedly.
So, given that you can't 'shard off' the different offices (you are trying to facilitate the 'death of distance', right?) and you need to have a single virtual office where people can intermingle and interact richly, how are you going to accomodate the insane bandwidth and latency requirements of a fully-annotated virtual environment? Or, are the geographically remote participants going to have to suffer the latency inherent in such a rich environment as the cost of global collaboration?
I don't know the answer yet, just the question. I will be doing some more thinking about this this week in Coventry England where I have the honor of being the keynote presenter for the second year running at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference. I will bring up this issue to the virtual world vendors and customers present and see if any of them can quickly dispell my concerns. Else, feel free to suggest solutions or disabuse me of any misconceptions in the comments.
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