Article reprint source: Metaverse IP Encyclopedia
Original source: Metaverse
Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI
The advent of the Internet has forever changed the way we store data. The rapid development of digital technology has brought us highly optimized search engines, widely used social networks, convenient mobile applications, and high-speed and efficient cloud computing. At the same time, there is also a higher demand for data storage. As the relevant fields of the metaverse gradually improve, the storage industry will also usher in greater changes.
The first thing to be affected is the increase in data volume. According to IDC's forecast, from 2018 to 2025, the total amount of global data will increase from 33ZB to 175ZB, with a compound annual growth rate of 26.9%. Moreover, in the context of the layout of metaverse-related industries, enterprise data will become the mainstream of data output, and the amount of data will grow exponentially.
Such a huge amount of data and the scale of data in the foreseeable future will also bring unprecedented challenges.
The demand for Metaverse data storage is huge
Facing the metaverse, I believe many people will have questions about how it will eventually appear before our eyes? In fact, just like "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers", at present, no industry or organization has a clear definition of the metaverse. However, there is a relatively recognized view in the industry that the essence of the metaverse is the virtualization and digitization of the real world and human society.
If you want to break away from complex concepts and understand "digitalization" from a more fundamental perspective, you might as well find a pure application scenario.
For example, movies such as The Matrix and Westworld show the possible forms of human life in the digital world. Westworld provides a technical method to move towards the metaverse, observing humans and simulating everything they see, hear, touch, and feel over and over again with AI until the error is zero. If the metaverse really uses such a simulation method, it is conceivable that the amount of data generated behind the calculation is huge and the storage is difficult.
At present, we believe that the data of the Metaverse can be roughly divided into four types:
1. Various environmental data of the entire virtual world;
2. Personal information data actively uploaded by users;
3. Personal information data actively uploaded by users, data generated by the interaction between “Digital Human” and Metaverse;
4. Data that users bring into the Metaverse from the real world.
With the development of the Metaverse, more digital application scenarios will emerge. For example, in the field of education, the Metaverse can provide students with more realistic virtual experiments and online course experiences, such as physical experiments or historical event simulations through virtual reality technology; in the field of entertainment, the Metaverse can become a new gaming platform that provides a more realistic gaming experience; in the medical field, the Metaverse can be used for remote medical care and surgical simulation training to improve the efficiency and quality of medical services. This also makes its storage requirements more complex than existing data storage requirements.
Moreover, since data needs to achieve high fidelity and real-time interaction in the virtual world, higher requirements are placed on storage stability, security, low latency, persistence, etc.
How modern applications meet data storage challenges
The rise of the Metaverse will bring about profound changes in the data storage market. This includes not only access from a large number of users at any location, but also access and data exchange requests from a large number of various systems. At the same time, how to ensure data permissions and security during access and use, how to effectively protect data property rights, and how to prevent data abuse are all huge challenges to data processing capabilities.
In addition, digital assets in the Metaverse are valuable, making data protection in the Metaverse an issue that cannot be ignored and requires extraordinary security and reliability.
According to IDC, in the past 12 months, more than one-third of the world's organizations have been attacked or hacked by ransomware, rendering systems or data inaccessible. Once the Metaverse emerges, it will inevitably become an important ransomware target.
This also tells us that, unlike traditional application scenarios, the immersive, low-latency, and diversified scenario characteristics of the Metaverse make its unique data characteristics trigger changes in storage architecture.
Final Thoughts
Overall, with the rapid development of the digital economy, the future prospects of the Metaverse are bright. PwC has predicted that the market size of the Metaverse will reach 1.5 trillion US dollars in 2030. As the pillar of the endless data behind the Metaverse, the storage industry will inevitably usher in a new development cycle and lead the next round of changes in data infrastructure.
