Testing the metaverse

The metaverse has been around for a long time, but since Facebook changed the name of its parent company to Meta, it’s been on everyone’s lips.

But what is the metaverse? Etymologically it means beyond the universe, and the metaverse is a virtual, immersive, multi-sensory universe. Metaverse users create an avatar and meet up with other avatars (users) to talk, attend virtual events, play, learn, shop, work, etc. We go from surfing the internet in front of a screen to being inside it. Extended reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality… all these realities are part of the metaverse and lead us to the next generation of the internet, where the physical and digital worlds merge. Metaverses allow avatars to interact in a variety of environments thanks to augmented reality, virtual reality, the convergence of 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud processing, along with XR experiences.

The science fiction film industry has been dealing with the metaverse for a long time, perhaps best reflected in films such as Ready Player One or Free Guy, among others.

Nowadays there are already many metaverses, the best known are: Decentraland, The Sandbox, Somnium Space, Roblox, Cryptovoxels, Bloktopia, Axie Infinity, Star Atlas and Minecraft.

Its impact is projected to be so great in the future that some companies have already started to showcase their products and services as an introduction into the world of the metaverse. Major brands such as Nike, BMW, H&M, Gucci or Coca-Cola, among others, are investing in the development and growth of metaverses and have developed virtual locations offering their products so that users can purchase and use them within the metaverse.

Facebook is developing its own metaverse; Nvidia is working on its Omniverse platform to connect these virtual worlds, Microsoft is working on a Teams add-on to be launched in 2022 allowing the use of avatars in our meetings, among other innovations.

The metaverse is bringing us ever closer to a virtual reality, offering fully connected, immersive 3D experiences and presenting new opportunities for consumers and businesses alike. Together with extended reality technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), they are evolving to offer a next-generation Internet that overlays our physical world.

Now that we know a little about metaverses, let’s get down to business.

At SIPSA we always think about software quality, whatever the system or product. For this reason, we also take care to protect the quality of metaverses. Putting ourselves in the user’s shoes, we must consider 3 important aspects in the testing of metaverses:

– Cybersecurity: the complexity of the metaverse, its undefinable nature, means more potential avenues for attack and propagation. Security testing is already a fundamental part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) but will need to advance to keep pace with the changing tactics of hackers in the metaverse.

– API testing: APIs are crucial to the interoperability fundamental to meta-experiences. APIs need to be tested to identify issues and really understand how the software is used, as they will be critical to support the level of interoperability, flexibility, and decentralisation that metaverse experiences require.

– Interactive and immersive testing: real people will be central to testing meta-experiences as the need to test interactivity grows.

How do we test metaverses?

Speed, responsiveness, and stability are essential elements of a great user experience. Performance testing will help us uncover problems or bottlenecks that can hinder the stability, speed, responsiveness, and scalability of a metaverse under normal and high user loads. The sheer amount of data and ultra-fast networks needed to power AR and VR experiences make performance testing exceptionally important for the metaverse. Finding and reducing latency issues is absolutely necessary to maximise the quality of AR and VR experiences and improve the overall user experience.

Load tests are run to understand the behaviour of a system under a given load, which may be the number of concurrent users the customer expects in production, without forcing it to a higher-than-expected capacity.

**Capacity tests **are used to assess the point at which the product breaks down, reaching the maximum user load that a system can support over a long period of time without becoming unacceptably stable.

Stress testing tests the robustness and reliability of the product by subjecting it to extreme usage conditions. This includes sending excessive requests and running under limited hardware conditions.

In the metaverse, usability testing should be used to assess the overall quality of the platform as well as the AR and VR experiences offered. Usability testing can help the organisation improve its platform by uncovering areas or aspects that can be improved, identifying design flaws that hinder the user interface, and gaining a better understanding of how users interact with the platform.

Accessibility testing is important to ensure that all users can access, navigate, interact with, and correctly understand the content or information being offered or presented.

Some aspects to consider are:

• The presence of subtitles for video or audio content.
• The use of alternative controls to help people to navigate or perform actions.
• The use of alt tags for visual elements
• Text that has a high contrast with its background

Entering a metaverse

To understand how to test the metaverse we have logged into one of them, Decentraland

Let’s create a list of functional tests:

Login:
The login can be done as a guest or with your cryptowallet.

-We are asked for an email; we enter it and accept.

-The data protection message appears and if you scroll down to the end, the accept box is activated.

Avatar creation:

• We login correctly and proceed to the creation of our avatar:

*The experience with the glasses is a bit overwhelming and create dizziness, as we want to focus on the functional tests of the software, we proceed to do the tests through a conventional browser (We leave the hardware for another post).

Otherwise, everything works perfectly:

It asks us for a name for our avatar. We write it and the name of our avatar changes.

We customise our avatar: we modify the gender and all the physical characteristics (skin colour, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, clothes, accessories… etc.) Everything works as expected, the colours and characteristics match the expected results.

*As for the hardware, it is worth mentioning that we get a first message about our graphics card. “Your machine is not using a dedicated graphics card to run Decentraland. This might lead to performance issues. Check your browser and OS configuration”.

• We finish creating our avatar and appear in Genesis Plaza.

Alice, our help assistant, appears and guides us through a tutorial, written out, teaching us the movement commands, where to find the chat, put the camera in first person, open the map, etc.

• We complete the tutorial and click through each step, and everything works as expected.
  We move around the stage, and we can select what we want to do in the panels (classics, events, and crowd) or by opening the map and selecting a location.

• We click on the map, and it opens:

This is huge, we find museums, masterclasses, crowdfunding stalls to collaborate in the fight against some disease, you can enter a zoo, you can play games of all kinds, ride a dragon, go to the cinema, the casino, the theatre, concerts, the beach, participate in events, rides, there are universities, amusement parks, you can see a lot of advertising and invest in it, etc.

• We can move around the map, and it tells us where we are at all times.

• We zoom in/out, and it works.

• When you click somewhere on the map, it starts to load the scenario and takes you to the place where you clicked.

*It is important to have certain hardware features for an optimal user experience. As the message about our graphics card warned us, it takes a long time to load when we access different places on the map and the image quality is not very good.

• We click on Dragon Rush. It is a game to fly over a dragon, the dragon appears and the commands to play appear.

• We get on the dragon and fly. The commands work, but it is difficult to stay on top of the dragon and the user experience is bad. The graphics are not very realistic, you fly standing up…

As for the 3D graphics, it should be noted that users of Decentraland are who design the environments. They buy land (LAND plots) using MANA (Decentraland’s cryptocurrency token) and build on them what they want, with the possibility of monetising their plots.

How can SIPSA help to create quality metaverses?

SIPSA, as an IT consultancy specialising in software quality, test automation and digital transformation, is on the cutting edge of technology trends. Our expert testing team has worked on a multitude of projects performing all kinds of tests and automating them. With TAST | Test Automation System Tool, a complete and codeless test automation framework, you will learn how to automate in just 3 days.

Contact us, tell us what new project you are working on, and we will help you achieve the highest quality of your software product, either in this universe or in any metaverse 😉.