This is the second part of “A First Look at the Metaverse”, focusing on the role of hardware in the “Metaverse”. Here, hardware is defined as “the physical technology and devices used to access, interact with, or exploit the Metaverse. This includes, but is not limited to, consumer-facing hardware such as VR headsets, mobile phones, and haptic gloves and industrial hardware such as those used to manipulate or create virtual or AR-based environments, such as industrial cameras, projection and tracking systems, and scanning sensors. This category does not include computing-specific hardware, such as GPU chips and servers, and network-specific hardware, such as fiber optic cables or wireless chipsets.
Consumer hardware
Every year, consumer hardware benefits from better and canada mobile database more powerful sensors, longer battery life, more complexvaried haptics, richer screens, sharper cameras, etc. We also see an increasing number of smart devices, such as watches, VR headsets and soon, AR glasses. All of these advances enhance and extend user immersion, although software provides the actual experience or "magic."
As a limited example, consider real-time avatar apps like Bitmoji, Animoji, and Snapchat AR. These depend on reasonably powerful CPUGPUs see Section 3 and sophisticated software. But they also require powerful facial tracking cameras and ever-improving sensor hardware, which is being enriched. Newer iPhone models can now track 30,000 points on your face via infrared sensors. While this is most commonly used for Face ID, it can now be connected to apps like Epic Games’ Live Link Face app, enabling any consumer to create and stream real-time, high-fidelity avatars based on the Unreal Engine. An obvious next step for Epic would be to use this capability to map Fortnite players’ faces onto their in-game characters in real time.