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

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.