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When CCP Games needed someone to help set up a massive real-time space battle involving 14,000 ships, it turned into Hadean. And that’s one of the reasons why the UK startup raised $30 million.
London-based Hadean hopes to create the infrastructure for the metaverse, and it’s already supporting virtual worlds in immersive entertainment and enterprise digital twins. (We’ll be discussing the topic of the real-time metaverse at our GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 event October 25-26 in San Francisco).
Hadean creates distributed, spatial, and scalable computers for web 3.0 and the metaverse. The distributed cloud platform is a software layer that enables scalability, security and interoperability, driving the metaverse and digital immersive experiences for enterprise, commercial, gaming and government customers.
One of the challenges now is that advances in chips and computing performance won’t come easy, now that Moore’s Law has slowed down. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Moore’s Law and the economic benefits that come from chip miniaturization are essentially dead — just in time for the metaverse to arrive.
Keshani said Web3 and open architecture will likely be the foundation of the metaverse.
“We will not have monopolies controlling this future,” she said. “We’re going to see new, weird, and wonderful business models supported by empowering the next generation of creators to build that future. And we are enthusiastic about that. We don’t see ourselves as defining the metavers. We create technology that provides the capabilities to enable that creative economy to build it. We don’t know what it looks like. But we are excited to be working with partners like Epic who share this vision.”
Molten Ventures led financing, with participation from 2050 Capital, Alumni Ventures, Aster Capital,
Entrepreneur First and InQTel. The Series A round, along with an investment from Epic Games, will
Help Hadean build the company’s scalable, interoperable, and secure metaverse capabilities.
As an open platform for distributed cloud computing, Hadean can be considered the
“infrastructure” powering the metaverse so it can become a reality, Hadean chief operating officer Mimi Keshani said in an interview with GamesBeat.
“We’ve created a distributed computing platform and we’ve built some apps that are great for spatial computing,” Keshani said. “And that lends itself very well to powering 3D virtual worlds even better. We are cutting our teeth in the gaming industry.”
The company started in 2015 and the current management, led by Craig Beddis, CEO of Hadean, joined in 2017. After doing the demo with CCP in 2019, it was able to strike a multi-year deal with Microsoft’s Minecraft.
“Hadean’s mission is to bridge physical and virtual worlds — to help us make better decisions and ultimately improve the quality of our lives in the physical world, Beddis said in a statement. “Today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience – small-scale, isolated and insecure. That’s why these are the technical challenges we’re addressing today. But we believe the real success and mass adoption of the metaverse will depend on the ease with which creators can build their own experiences at scale, leveraging open and robust metaverse-as-a-service technologies. We are excited to partner with industry leaders such as Epic Games, who share our ethos and ambition for this reality.”
Hadean has developed metaverse components and signed multi-year agreements in entertainment (Minecraft, Pixelynx, Sony and Gamescoin), as well as with education and enterprise digital twin providers.
In 2019, Hadean did an Unreal Engine demo for 14,000 players with EVE Online creator CCP Games.
“Hadean’s computing power will provide the infrastructure needed as we work to create a
scalable metaverse,” Marc Petit, vice president of the Unreal Engine Ecosystem at Epic Games, said in a statement. “The company’s technology complements Epic’s Unreal Engine by enabling massive amounts of concurrent users and unlocking new tools for creators and developers. We are happy to contribute to
Hadean’s growth and look forward to continuing to work together to lay the groundwork for the metaverse.”
That real-time demo showed that the company’s infrastructure allows for large numbers of concurrent participants in a virtual environment. This new wave of funding will accelerate Hadean’s ability to give makers the tools in new and emerging metaverse markets to change every aspect of how we work, build, buy and consume.
Hadean has partnered with music metaverse creator Pixelynx, who aims to bring thousands of people together in virtual music concerts. It is also working with the British Army on training simulations.
Keshani said Hadean focuses on core issues, including scale, where you need to reach players around the world. It also targets concurrent users, or the number of people you can fit in a virtual world space in real time. Keshani said the company has tools that allow customers to support thousands of players simultaneously in the same experience. Compare that to the hundred players you can normally find in a game like Fortnite. Hadean also works on security.
Solving latency, or delays in interactions in applications such as games, becomes a huge challenge for the metaverse.
“Latency is based on the physical limits,” Keshani said. “The speed of light will not change. When we think of multi-thousand-player synchronous environments, we need to have a way to communicate between the core simulation and anything closer to the edge where people are playing games.”
Hadean’s software sits close to the edge, minimizing information reaching the end client to keep speed high and bandwidth costs low.
“It’s about smartly or intelligently sharing the right information the customer needs to keep the status up-to-date and make sure the messages are all cued the right way, without overloading them and making them more information than they need and eventually crash. and fall behind,” she said.
Rather than creating a wrapper around an existing tech stack, Hadean redesigned the tech stack for the Web3 era, Keshani said. The game developer is not concerned about scaling. They just write the game logic and Hadean will handle the scaling in the cloud, Keshani said.
She thinks the technology for the real-time metaverse isn’t far off. In fact, she believes we have tons of computing power to handle the metaverse. But we’re just not using it efficiently right now, she said.
“You only really have to pay for the cloud spend you actually use,” she said.
Subspace tried to use hardware and alternative paths on the Internet to get around bottlenecks. But that turned out to be an expensive solution and Subspace went bankrupt. In contrast, Hadean’s focus is on working with customers on infrastructure and helping them use it more efficiently.
Current solutions place a wrapper around existing technology to scale applications, but that introduces a lot of complexity, Keshani said.
In terms of revenue, Hadean has generated more than 10 million in revenue and is reaching 50,000 concurrent players in its scaling tests. The company employs 115 people.
As for the definition of the metaverse, Keshani envisions a real-time persistent 3D virtual world with connections to the physical world.
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