The DeanBeat: RP1 simulates bringing 4,000 people together in a single metaverse square

RP1 is a metaverse startup that has simulated bringing 4,000 people together in a single metaverse square or shard.

In metaverse circles, that’s a pretty good tech feat, as games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone will put 100 or 150 players in the same digital space, dubbed for example. They can replicate those instances infinitely, but someone in one instance can’t talk to anyone in another except through long delays. That is why the work of RP1, while it is still in its prototype stage, could be important.

Because the metaverse is seen as a real-time, synchronous experience, delays in interaction or latency are the enemy. Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, spoke at our metaverse event in January about the issue of the “sniper and the metaverse.” In a game like Fortnite, players are often grouped into shards, or single servers, where they can communicate (meaning fight) anything they want. But if a sniper goes to a tall building or a mountain, and they can spot someone far away, they can scout someone in another shard, and that’s a no-no when it comes to latency.

Sean Mann and Dean Abramson, the founders of RP1, want to solve this problem by redesigning servers so that they can squeeze many more people into the same space. Companies like Improbable and others are trying to do the same, but it’s kind of a metaverse Holy Grail.

“When a lot of people talk about the metaverse, they mention the lack of scalability,” Abramson said. “That’s a big roadblock to actually reaching a real metaverse. They say it’s just not possible and we have to wait for hardware and Moore’s law to double multiple times. They say we are a decade or maybe two away from actually achieving what everyone believes is the future iteration of the internet shared by everyone on this planet.”

As a company, RP1 believes it is possible with ultra-efficient software.

“We’ve reached the ability to not only maximize on a single server, which is what the first demo did,” Mann said. “You’ve seen how we can get a huge amount of people in one place. A server can monitor those thousands of people with complete fidelity. That’s very important, because in gaming there are many people who don’t do full fidelity. It’s a very difficult problem to scale with characters with finger and hand movements and facial expressions.”

Many visionaries have talked about the metaverse, and the consensus is that we’re a decade or two away, waiting for hardware to enable a large scalable world via a 3D browser, Mann said.

Tim Sweeney to Matthew Ball and now the publishing of PWC and McKinsey reports all describe a big, persistent world. And it all starts with scalability or we just connect intranets, Mann said. Placing many users in one instance and connecting applications together is a difficult problem to solve.

“Current gaming engines are not designed to support uncompiled web-deployed experiences (games, social, etc.) at scale and quality. It will take a complete rethink of technologies to enable this vision,” Mann said.

For the past 10 years, the founders of RP1 have been working on a new paradigm for solving the network server architecture in the turn-based gaming space, starting with online poker. They have a small team of less than 10 people.

They realized that the same architecture could be applied with minor adjustments to solve the problems inherent in the prevailing gaming architectures.

The system RP1 is building will enable creators and developers to deploy 3D spatial content in gaming, social, digital twins and Internet of Things applications to be experienced in a real-time persistent application.

“This new architecture allows game companies, content creators and developers to focus on what they do best without worrying about scale, while also deploying content directly in a persistent, shardless world that could hold hundreds of millions of dollars. to host. users seamlessly moving in and out of different real-time applications (known as the metaverse),” said Yin-Chien Yeap, chief client architect for RP1, in an interview. All of this is possible at a small fraction of the cost of what cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Azure charge.”

A demo

I went to a prototype metaverse world where RP1 demonstrated the technology. They’ve just completed the first phase of a demo featuring 4,000 full-fidelity avatars (six degrees of freedom, IK, face, hand, and finger tracking) with 3D spatial audio in a single permanent, shard-less virtual reality space measuring approximately one square kilometer. in size. They did this in a VR app accessible through the Oculus Quest 2 (that’s how I signed up) through a browser with no pre-downloads using a six-year-old server.

Abramson said the audio solution alone is disruptive because it is a huge challenge in the gaming industry. As I passed several non-player characters in the demo (each representing possible unique players), I could hear them talking via audio with unique scripted statements. It was spatial audio, where I could hear them in one ear or the other as I walked by.

I definitely felt a sense of presence thanks to the 3D audio. I could walk around and soar above the crowd, but I always heard the sound coming in a focused way. We went from an urban area to a place that looked more like a big square, and it got very noisy as RP1 kept dropping bots into space. At one point there were thousands in the simulation with me.

Yeap also showed me around the demo. He helped build the space with RP1 and was very impressed with the technology. He said he wanted to use it to create his own applications.

“The bottleneck isn’t in server connectivity,” Yeap says.

The proximity audio is also an important part of the demo, with full spatial audio in a VR room. The technology is not limited to VR rooms but can also be done on desktop or mobile devices or game consoles. The demo used WebXR graphics on a Meta Quest 2 VR headset.

“There are trade-offs,” Yeap said. “As we increase the reliability of the avatars, the number of avatars decreases. It moves the bottleneck to the graphics pipe, rather than to the network type.”

He added: “Sometimes you think if you pull 400 avatars, the network will die because the WebRTC can’t handle that many peer-to-peer connections or voting, for example. But in the case of working with the RP1 code, I discovered that the bottleneck is completely graphics. The network has, for the first time in working with other network engines, I ran out of graphics before the network ran out of capacity, which is amazing. And that’s why I love working there so much I feel like that’s a huge promise to be able to deliver the kind of mass participation that the metaverse always claims to be on the way.”

Abramson said RP1 can probably mix about five times more audio than it mixes in the demo now. There will be more benefits once RP1 can add more machines to its demo, he said.

Of course, it’s just a simulation and it’s just a demo. You could say it’s not proven until you actually have 4,000 people in a small space. But Mann and Abramson think that day will come.

“From the server’s perspective, the bots send information like humans would, and the bots actually outperform a human because they’re talking all the time,” Abramson said.

Next steps

In the second phase, many servers will be linked together to place 100,000 users in a space of 20 square kilometers. It will also be persistent and shardless, with only the budget limiting factor, not the limitations of what the hardware and network can do. (The company hopes to raise money).

“We will leverage different experiences to show what the future could look like through a brand new browser with unlimited uses in social experiences and gaming,” Mann said. “What gets us excited is that we imagine that a user sends a link to where they are in a store, museum, game, workspace, or social gathering and that a friend or fan can immediately play or watch with them from any location. device (mobile, AR, VR and desktop) without having to download anything beforehand.”

The company has shown the demo to as many major game companies as possible.

“There are other architectural changes we should make on the server side,” Abramson said. “We haven’t done this yet, but if you were in a stadium and you were surrounded by 10,000 people, we could give you the full audio experience of all 10,000 people, even if we could only show you the movements of the nearest thousand.”

It’s not clear what would happen if you tried to use RP1 technology for a game like Fortnite. It depends on how big the card is or how many people you want to squeeze into a small space.

“If everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder, you won’t have much of a struggle,” Abramson said. “There are limits to the number of people you will see on the horizon. You can see 10 kilometers away. When you get to about 250 meters, people are virtually invisible.”

In any case, Abramson believes you could have a lot more people in a room than you can currently fit in battle royale games. Part of the question becomes whether you want that. But I can provide games where you attack a large medieval army on another with individualized actions, Braveheart style.

“Everyone would be really on top of each other,” Abramson said.

The next step would be to demonstrate 100,000 people in one room, or a million. All this is theoretical until RP1 gets more resources to show bigger and bigger demos, but it’s a big dream and this is a start.

“We hope people will understand that the idea that the metaverse is 10 to 20 years away because we’re just waiting for Moore’s Law to fix the hardware problem is wrong,” Mann said. “We want people to know that’s not the case. The real scenario is that hopefully within a year we can roll out a fully scalable system that can handle many people in a shardless architecture.”