Improbable is attacking the metaverse’s networking problem
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Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, is trying to solve the networking problem of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
His London-based company started creating internet infrastructure and software that was built for multiplayer gaming and massive virtual worlds.
The company’s Project Morpheus software, which Narula says will be able to support 10,000 players in the same space. Currently, games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone can support 100 or 150 players, respectively, as they battle each other with automatic weapons. This capability was why Improbable was able to raised $500 million from SoftBank and more money from others as it readied its software.
Narula is aware of the sniper problem in the metaverse. Kim Libreri, chief technology officer at Epic Games, brought this up to me, explaining how most games separate players by location into grids. They provide responsive networking for actions that take place between characters in a grid, but not between grids. But a sniper sitting on a mountain perch has the ability to see far beyond one grid. That means that sniper has to be instantly networked with another player, who might be a target who is instantaneously trying to get away.
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Narula said he is trying to solve this problem. Improbable started off very ambitious trying to widen what is possible in a typical virtual world.
“You have all these limitations, the number of players you can have, the number of interactions they
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