Reality Check of Metaverse: A First Look at Commercial Social Virtual Reality Platforms
Ruizhi Cheng, Nan Wu, Songqing Chen, Bo Han
Abstract
Metaverse has grasped the news headlines recently. While being heavily advocated by the industry, there are great in-terests from academia as it demands various technological support from both hardware and software research. There has been an extensive visionary discussion of metaverse lately, but there are few studies on its technical challenges and user experience in practice. To fill this critical gap, in this paper, we take a first look at Workrooms, arguably a premature metaverse product released by Meta (a.k.a. Face-book). The goal of our study is to gain an in-depth under-standing of the current state of the metaverse and identify potential issues for improvement. Through extensive meas-urement studies, we dissect the underlying network support and demand of Workrooms. Our investigation reveals sev-eral interesting findings. For example, Workrooms utilizes different network flows to transmit virtual content and real-time multimedia content separately. This might be a prin-cipled approach that should be adopted in general. On the other hand, the current design of Workrooms faces imper-ative scalability challenges that should be addressed in any large-scale metaverse platform.