At this year’s DeveloperWeek, Roblox CTO Dan Sturman sat down with Stripe CTO David Singleton to discuss the “Technology Stack for the Metaverse.” Missed the event and want to attend it? Check out the recap and the recording below.
This year, Roblox participated in DeveloperWeek in Oakland, California. We joined an audience of developers, creators, and engineers to talk about the technology stack that will be needed to develop the metauniverse in the future.
“We are moving towards people communicating with each other and sharing experiences with each other in an immersive 3D environment. Companies building large, robust cloud systems to support social media and other web applications will need to adapt their technology stacks if they want to support these massive 3D social capabilities,” said Dan Sturman, CTO of Roblox.
Dan and David discussed how technology is now at an exciting point where the metaverse is where everything was in the early days of the internet. In the mid-1990s no one was sure how the web stack would come together, and now we’ve once again reached an inflection point for a new type of technology. today, a technology stack for web technologies that is common is a single server data center with an established framework, standard tools, and a whole stack that is very well known. By comparison, supporting 3D requires an immersive shared experience highly interactive communications that reflect real life, low latency supported by a robust core and edge data center infrastructure, and a a client-server system that can handle massive worlds.
David Singleton remarked, “It’s really exciting to think about how this could completely change the dynamics of teams that create software-based experiences for people around the world.”
“At Roblox, we deploy over 20 data centers around the world because last-hop latency is critical. We can’t have people with a full second of latency – in fact, we usually want it to be well below 200 milliseconds. Also, what’s interesting is that your client device does a lot more in this 3D world because of the precision, the refresh rate, the graphic intensity of what’s going on,” noted Dan Sturman at DeveloperWeek. He continued, “The good news is that at Roblox we’re looking at build once, run anywhere approaches. So when you create a Roblox experience, for example, that experience can run on a high-end PC, it can run on a phone three generations old, it can run on a VR headset or a console – and you as a creator don’t have to customize your experience to have all those things worked”.
Any time there is a big, sweeping change, it can be daunting and scary, but also very rewarding. We are excited to be part of building the next frontier: a technology stack that provides users with a hyper-realistic experience in the virtual world. Watch Dan Sturman and David Singleton talk about all this and more in the video here.
To join us on our journey building the tech stack of the future, visit careers.roblox.com.