Negative Latency in the Tactile Internet as Enabler for Global Metaverse Immersion

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The future Metaverse has been proposed as a solution to various social problems, requiring new concepts. This evolution of the Metaverse will be geared toward solving real-world tasks by combining humans and machines in virtual and real spaces. This, in turn, necessitates the inclusion of additional human senses, including the tactile modality, to enable fully immersive human-machine and human-machine-human cooperation. The resulting challenges of communicating ultra-low latency information below a 1 ms threshold have guided the Tactile Internet’s approaches to decrease various additive delay components. However, physically determined propagation delays geographically limit the future Metaverse when considering all human senses. We propose the concept of negative latency to address this limitation for the next evolution of the Metaverse that enables seamless and global user interactions. Our negative latency concept provides guarantees on predicted user actions to reduce perceived latency with high confidence. We evaluate a proof-of-concept setup for grabbing tasks with a smart sensor glove and show that negative latencies of several hundred ms are attainable. Taking advantage of this and other advanced technologies in the Tactile Internet, we envision a truly global, immersive, and interactive Metaverse 2.0 that supports meaningful interactions between humans and machines.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)167-173
Number of pages7
JournalIEEE network
Volume38
Issue number5
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 11 Mar 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8409-5390/work/158767932
ORCID /0000-0001-8469-9573/work/161891115
ORCID /0000-0002-4590-1908/work/163294017

Keywords

Keywords

  • 5G, Aerospace electronics, Anticipatory networking, Communication networks, Delays, Human in the loop, Metaverse, Negative latency, Propagation delay, Tactile Internet