Learning To Test in the Metaverse

The Metaverse promises a new kind of internet capable of integrating real-world events and online sources into a seamless user experience. While it's often billed as 'just' a VR concept to users, it's something far more complex and interesting to technology companies and developers with an eye on the future.

The concepts offered as part of the Metaverse's future offerings could solve some of the web's biggest challenges. Improved interactions, identity verifications, and transactions that span both virtual and physical worlds will change how we think about the web from the ground up. However, each of these tasks raises enormous practical challenges for the designers, developers, and engineers tasked with building it.

Put simply, if we're truly going to shift how we work, socialize, and entertain using the web, then we've got a lot of work to do to get there.

Creating the consistency and reliability necessary to allow consumers and creators to trust the Metaverse is the first and most difficult thing we're going to have to do. Creating an environment for productive interactions between users, vendors, and institutions while utilizing new technologies, standards, and methods of communication raises some of the biggest challenges seen since the initial development of the web.

So, let's take a close look at those unique new challenges and how to design for and test a brand-new technology platform using the tools available today.

What Is the Metaverse?

Putting aside the new technology hype and its broad expectations amongst users, it's difficult to predict exactly what the Metaverse is going to look like as it evolves in the coming months and years.

To some, the Metaverse looks like a modern iteration of existing virtual reality (VR) platforms such as Second Life. New technologies could make even this simplified version of the platform an attractive prospect for consumers and creators. Virtual and augmented reality headsets coming from major tech companies in the next 12 months hint at exciting new ways of interacting with the web. However, cryptocurrencies are gearing up to form an integral part of the new platform and broader web3 capabilities to make the Metaverse even more interesting.

“The metaverse is the new land of opportunities,” crypto investor Vignesh Sundaresan told a panel of industry leaders recently at the Verge 23 tech conference. “It’s not about the commerce behind it, but having a place where people from different parts of the world can . . . have an opportunity for prosperity.”

The future of the Metaverse is expected to be larger than life, complex, and consistently evolving over its lifetime. The fundamental principles of the platform, however, will remain the same throughout. These are:

Interconnection

The Metaverse of the future will be built around integrations that pull from every important aspect of users' daily lives. The technology promises consistent integration across major tech platforms and services in a way gaming platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox ecosystem have been struggling to achieve for over a decade.

Metaverse promises technologies that will allow users to walk their VR avatar between virtual worlds and events seamlessly. The technical specs for this kind of seamless transition hint at visual equivalence between worlds instead of aesthetic parity.

In practice, each ecosystem will be able to maintain its own look and feel while allowing users and objects to be instantly recognizable. However, these integrations aren't just skin deep. Connections powered by blockchain technologies, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are making it possible to establish a Metaverse with seamlessly connected transactions that extend into the physical world.

Immersion

The biggest draw of the Metaverse for users is expected to be the ability to embark on experiences packed with breathtaking content across virtual worlds. Modern tools such as wearable devices, computer vision software, and inter-connected hardware make it possible for creators to blend the divide between online and in-person experiences.

To do this well, the Metaverse relies on three key technologies growing in popularity today.

1. Virtual Reality (VR): A digital world created from the ground up for users to experience. Often used to immerse players in video games and experiences — the future of VR technologies is certain to include training and eCommerce at a minimum while potentially encompassing small-scale meetings and large-scale events too.
2. Augmented Reality (AR): Overlaying digital information on top of the physical world — AR adds data, context, and digital capabilities to our everyday experience.
3. Mixed Reality (MR): Combining both AR and VR allows developers to put digital experiences in real-world events and allow interactions between the physical world and virtual objects that create truly immersive experiences for users.

As these technologies grow and improve then the possibilities available for Metaverse applications expand with time too. It's impossible to predict what will be possible within Metaverse development 12 months from now. The accelerating pace of change in its related fields of technology makes it a long-term solution worthy of investigation for forward-thinking developers.

Endless Expansion

The potential for these upcoming tools and technologies is something we haven't seen since the earliest days of the web. The closest analog we have today is modern triple-A video games from major game studios that show what can be done with innovative development. These titles from publishers such as Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Activision Blizzard represent just the start of what users can do with truly engaging experiences.

The Metaverse provides the opportunity to deploy these same tools to the way we shop, experience virtual and in-person events, and engage with each other both socially and professionally. The way we think about the web, data, socializing, and work will have to change in the next couple of years.

“It’s about community building, conversations and interactions. We want to enable worker avatars to move between a manufacturing world and an interior design world, or equally take that avatar and go and watch a concert in Roblox and Fortnite.” Andy Sands, co-founder of PixelMax, a software company that helps organizations engage with the Metaverse, told the Harvard Business Review.

It's these exciting new possibilities and the potential for significant improvements in what we have today that make the Metaverse such an appealing prospect for users and organizations. These are also key reasons that these new technologies should be handled with care as users, developers, and businesses get familiar with what they can do. How, when, and where the technology is deployed will matter a great deal in how the platform is received.

Risks of the Metaverse

By dissolving boundaries between physical and virtual worlds, the Metaverse opens developers up to new risks and challenges that have never been seen before. Issues such as ensuring personal safety in a virtual environment, protecting against new kinds of fraud, and maintaining secure transactions in a new environment will have to be learned fast and effectively to build trust in the platform.

Some of the biggest challenges emerging in this field right now are:

• Privacy and data: The Metaverse is data-driven first and foremost and exists at the intersection of new technologies and shifting expectations. This creates a high-risk environment when it comes to securing data and maintaining privacy for users. How we verify transactions and communicate with vendors is expected to change dramatically. Communicating those changes accurately will be critical to ensuring success.
• Fraud: For many of the same reasons privacy is a fundamental issue, guarding against fraud will be critically important. It's often easier for bad actors to thrive in unfamiliar environments — particularly where well-known identities haven't had a chance to establish themselves.
• Legislation concerns: Legal frameworks often always lag behind technical innovation. It takes a lot of time before legal protections broaden and adapt to include new ways of conducting eCommerce. For the Meteverse, this is going to include protections over socializing, professional meetings, and transactions spanning into the physical world, too.
• Ensuring a user's personal safety: One of the biggest new challenges the Metaverse brings is in ensuring the experience doesn't threaten the personal safety of users. How we define and guard against harassment using these technologies is something that is still being improved upon on a daily basis.
• Creating a reliable user experience: For the Metaverse to thrive as a social, professional, and recreational platform, it has to be comfortable for users first and foremost. This means building a reliable user experience capable of delivering a high-quality audio-visual experience as promised.

Mitigating the Challenges of the Metaverse

Luckily, the Metaverse isn't being built entirely from scratch. Engineers have learned a lot about building services and technologies at scale over the last three decades of the web. Many of the lessons and tools used to mitigate risks at scale can be applied to these future projects.

Continuous integration (CI) strategies will be key to success using Metaverse technologies and a central component of design within the platform. When placed first and foremost in the design process, CI can provide guarantees to developers about safety and security that will fuel the platform's overall growth.

How to Apply Test-Driven Design (TDD) to the Metaverse

The biggest advantages of TDD happen to coincide neatly with the biggest risks of the Metaverse. By illuminating issues of safety, security, and reliance within projects, TDD strategies provide engineers with the tools and data necessary to address the field's biggest issues.

Good test-driven design allows engineers to discover more about a project ahead of development and allows teams to mitigate the biggest risks. The two most common techniques best suited for test-driven design in the Metaverse include:

• Acceptance Test-Driven Design (ATDD): Using customer stories and development paths to write acceptance tests before building the necessary functions. These tests combine with existing documentation to form the technical requirements of the system before software is implemented.
• Design for Testability (DFT): Developing the system with testing and debugging features added to allow tests to be executed pre- and post-deployment. In other words, testing is treated as a design concern to make the resulting system more observable and controllable.

Using AI To Test the Metaverse

The single biggest factor that separates the Metaverse from previous technologies is scale. The Metaverse is a large and ambitious project rivaling only the early stages of the web for its scope and capabilities. Testing for such a large-scale system will require high degrees of automation to succeed and new kinds of tools to assist engineers.

Luckily, AI and machine learning tools have evolved to create modern, highly adaptive, and scalable test solutions. Advances in computer vision, automated interaction, and object classification are some of the key technologies that can be applied to today's virtual worlds.

These provide the ability to conduct automated testing of digital avatars, their environments, and the seemingly infinite number of interactions available within the platform. It's the assurances and guarantees that such large-scale testing can provide that will make it possible for users and businesses to build trust in the platform.

Lessons From Game Studios Applied to the Metaverse

The best tools and techniques available for Metaverse development today come from major game studios that have been solving some of the same problems for over two decades. Testing virtual environments and gameplay objectives shares a lot in common with some of the goals of Metaverse technology.

Software emulation tools, for example, make it possible for engineers to test many different hardware configurations at once. ML testing solutions are capable of generating realistic inputs, monitoring the resulting outputs from emulated hardware devices, and providing guarantees on uptime and reliability.

Similar technologies are expected to evolve as an integral part of the test stack as our interactions with the Metaverse continue to increase. We should expect to see an increased focus on test-driven design and implementation using existing and evolving technologies to mitigate the biggest risks associated with the platform.

These tools will similarly begin feeding back into conventional development technologies for desktop, mobile, and web engineering practices. Using these advances, the Metaverse isn't only going to change how we shop, socialize, and work within it but the way we produce high-quality software outside of it, too.

Preparing for the Metaverse

Much like the early web, the Metaverse provides an opportunity to connect people in an entirely new way. The major difference today is that there are now millions of developers and more than a billion users already anticipating its arrival and ready to access its abundant resources. Where the web benefited from slow and steady growth over time, the Metaverse will have to succeed all at once if it's going to flourish in the same way.

The experience users receive with people and businesses they encounter on day one will dictate how they interact with the platform indefinitely. Test-driven design, robust tooling, and reliable technologies are the very best ways to ensure those interactions are positive and the platform as a whole continues to grow.