When it comes to the digital future, Metaverse is coming out to be the term that has all the buzz.
It is the idea of bridging virtual and physical worlds together to transform the way people socialize at work or play. More importantly, Metaverse is one of the key enablers of the Web 3.0 concept, where the tech environment would include things like augmented reality, virtual reality, and 5G.
According to Tidio, 39% of US adults see the metaverse helping them participate in activities that they couldn’t in the real world. Moreover, Mobile augmented reality (AR) devices will grow by 33% over the next 2 years. This is why, businesses are quickly investing into the Metaverse as the key to captivate audience’s attention and leverage the experience of mixed reality to generate sales.
From education to entertainment, metaverse holds all the potential to change the way people see gaming, travel, learning, retail, events, and even the corporate engagements. Though the process might involve extensive efforts on , the potential surrounding the opportunity is worth the investment.
But what Metaverse is comprised of?
To define, Metaverse is an extremely broad term and is something that still needs to be explored. However, to make it easy for developers, testers, and business analysts make the business groups and audience understand the concept, it is divided into 4 components.
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Content
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Hardware
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Platform
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Professional Services.
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However, it is extremely necessary that each of these components are explored and understood properly. And with all our expertise and understanding, we will aim to underline each of these factors while giving them a context for quality assurance & software testing:
Content
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As far as the content part is concerned, it works around creating rich experience for the users through applications that are easy to understand and interactive to use.
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Secondly, the content component even caters to the Metaverse applications that would range across industries like finances, gaming, transactional, social, and work.
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Combination of augmented and virtual environments that are made to complement interactions, encouraging real and virtual identities within the environment.
Hardware
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The next most significant factor that defines the success of Metaverse is hardware and infrastructure. These include all the components, devices, OS layers, and peripherals that can align the AR and VR technologies, allowing the necessary system support.
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The underlying infrastructure for Metaverse require access to cloud solutions along with consistent mobile networks and semiconductors. These even include accommodating edge computing and 5G networks to complement the transfer of large data packets and ensure minimal or zero latency during interactions.
Platform
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Navigating through Metaverse would need users to walk through various platforms in order to get the desired experience and access to content. However, achieving such goals would require in-app experiences or browsers or decentralized NFTs that could take users to the virtual worlds.
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Another important aspect of Metaverse platforms is allowing users to get access to metaverse tools to create 3D experiences, define creator tools, and even create progressive AI services. However, creating an immersive and enriching experience requires bringing various closed and open-source platforms that could bind APIs and nurture interoperability.
Services
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As far as services are concerned, it involves providing support on security and privacy for the users. Besides, it even involves data governance related to content moderation.
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Securing identity in the form of avatars, digital entities, and social graphs.
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Commerce will live on monetization and payment platforms that can even allow transactions made through cryptocurrency, NFTs, and digital wallets.
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Read How Artificial Intelligence Could Enable Improving Quality Assurance Objectives.
Testing The Metaverse
Though the metaverse society is getting more complex, testing and quality assurance are extremely significant aspects of the future of the web. Nevertheless, users see the Metaverse as a whole and nothing like individual components, which makes it even more important to work on areas like Hardware Diversity, Platform Interoperability, and Interactive experience.
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Hardware Identification
The process to test an application for metaverse begins with identifying the compatible hardware. Especially, when we are progressing towards the age of VR headsets, AR glasses, and mobile devices that are equipped with sensors. Thus, it becomes necessary to test for some sort of peripheral or devices that can align well with the metaverse community.
The test process may involve building a test matrix of compatible devices and check for the features that could be accommodated and accessed through them. And since all devices do not possess similar capabilities, the test plan should describe all the supported functional requirements.
Besides, there can be test cases that might need interoperable communication between different devices with the challenge of working over varying hardware, firmware versions, software, and limited device functionality.
Therefore, it becomes necessary to test that the hardware responds correctly to the defined use cases. These might involve camera tracking or hardware components like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, battery management, etc. All in all, the goals are creating a fully-functional, compatible, and performance-driven solution.
Platform Criticalities
When we say Metaverse, APIs are one of the most significant components. Moreover, creating an immersive metaverse experience require effective overlapping of platforms, tools, and user experiences. Thus, it becomes necessary to attain interoperability across APIs to ensure smooth interactions.
Nevertheless, the specifications related to APIs are continuously expanding with the growing metaverse. The increased complexity has created space for regression testing and cross-platform activity, making testers work on understanding the functioning of software systems, achieve the flexibility, and harness decentralization.
Thus, the process to work on metaverse platforms require developers to build classes and module support tests. In other words, testers could work on every new API to run unit test tracing, similar to how traceability matrix is worked for hardware testing.
Enriching Experiences
In the end, the core of metaverse experience is all about how real-world users feel. Be it a social app or anything that allows managing finances, it is the quality of experience that becomes the driving force for any digital product.
The test process for checking on experience require working on test cases that define how any user would interact with a metaverse application. These include common test approaches as well as checking on the functionality by working on user scenarios and defects that might hamper the expected results.
Moreover, testers could work on recreating the environment for testing, which can be anything like a living-room space or generating load. Besides, the idea of creating immersive experience need testers to work on test cases that align on immersive and interactive development. Also, the testers must work to follow critical feature signoff, along with well-regulated production level deployments and bug burndown charts.
To Conclude, testing the metaverse is an extremely complicated process that needs testers to have a multi-dimensional approach with endless supply of device entry points. Also, it is necessary that testers must follow a both functional and non-functional approach to all applications and experiences that are meant to be integrated in the Metaverse.
“Metaverse is all about the revolutionary internet. However, the process to accommodate evolving standards requires keeping the user experience central. Quality Assurance is the key to frictionless architecture and dynamic balance between hardware, platform, and services in the Metaverse.” ~ Kanika Vatsyayan, VP, Delivery & Operations
Along with that, working on test strategies that keep in account for both hardware and software objectives could enable QA teams to yield better outcomes. Also, the formation of test teams that have all the right experience working on internet and mobile development strategies could enable faster deployments. Parallelly, a focus on the creative objective of the Metaverse must be worked to solidify the quality objectives related to app capabilities and user experience.
Need help working on your Metaverse objectives? From APIs to device compatibility, we can handle it all.
For more information, feel free to contact our experts.
