- How important is hardware for Metaverse? Do you think it’s a key to the mass adoption of Metaverse?.
- Hardware is the most crucial element in the giant puzzle that is the metaverse. The concept of the metaverse is quite grandiose, however an obvious insight is that we need a great interface to interact with it, similar to how we have our sense to interact with our current world. For example, the realism of virtual reality is directly dependent and often bottlenecked on the current capabilities of our graphics hardware. Similarly, to achieve immersiveness in the metaverse, we will need to rely on other hardware primitives that likely don’t exist yet—that is why we are working on creating a new language of touch at Emerge.
- Just like cell phones were regarded as toys or knick knacks before hardware caught up with the vision, the metaverse will be seen as a novelty before hardware catches up. Once it does, I suspect that mass adoption will follow quickly. However, that’s not to say softare also doesn’t play a huge part—both software and hardware are usually intertwined.
2) Do you have any plans to foray into Indian market with your hardware products?
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Do you think going forward more startups/companies will venture into hardware space for Metaverse? What opportunity do you see there?
- To be honest, it is very hard to do hardware. It’s often expensive and risky, meaning only the bold will even attempt to do it. That being said, as more people start realizing that hardware is bottlenecking our progress in the Metaverse, many will probably begin to work on it.
- There is a lot of work to be done in the hardware space for the Metaverse. That’s what makes it exciting. There are primitives that need to be built that we don’t even know will look like. There is a massive opportunity to experiment in this space.
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What kind of hardware can we expect in the future?
- Firstly, there will be sensing hardware. This is technology that will try and understand what your real physical body is doing to try and make sense of it and utilize it to do things in the metaverse. This will include hand trackers, health/fitness trackers, and later down the line, brain-computer interfaces (devices that are able to “understand” your thoughts and act accordingly to them).
- Then there will be sensory hardware. This is technology that will try and reproduce your senses in the metaverse. Sight, smell, sound, taste, touch. The hard part here is making this hardware perfect. It is quite easy to make a prototype, but to satisfy human standards is very difficult.
- Lastly there must be improvement in computational hardware. There are zettabytes (one trillion gigabytes) of data in the world. Our eyes and brains render everything at insane levels. It is very difficult for our current technology to match up with this, but it is definitely possible in the future.
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How do you see scene in India panning out in terms of hardware manufacturing for Metaverse? There aren’t many players yet.
- India has a lot of very bright minds. In fact, a lot of our team here at Emerge is originally from India. So we know India has the talent, and soon it will hopefully have the resources. It is only a matter of time before we see great things from there.