Cloud and Distributed Systems Lab, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Recent years have seen a resurgence of societal interest in Metaverses and virtual reality (VR), with large companies such as Meta and Apple investing multi-billion dollars into its future. With the recent developments in VR hardware and software, understanding how to design and operate with good performance their key enabling technology---modifiable virtual worlds---becomes increasingly important. In this work, I summarize my research to this end conducted as part of my PhD thesis, which includes benchmarking, consistency in distributed systems, levering serverless computing for online gaming, and performance characterization of VR devices. We find that a metaverse can bring large societal benefits, but requires addressing a wide range of open computer systems challenges.