From Metaverse to MOOC: Can the Cloud meet scalability challenges for Open Virtual Worlds?

The use of immersive 3D virtual worlds for education continues to grow due to their potential for creating innovative learning environments and their enormous popularity with students. However, scalability remains a major challenge. Whereas MOOCs cope with tens of thousands of users downloading or streaming learning materials, the highly interactive, multi-user nature of virtual worlds is far more demanding - supporting even a hundred users in the same region at the same time is considered an achievement. However, if the normal number of concurrent users is relatively low and there is only an occasional need to have a large group in-world at the same time for a special event can the Cloud be used for supporting these high, but short-lived, peaks in demand? This paper develops a context for the deployment of immersive education environments in the Cloud and presents performance results of Cloud-based virtual world hosting.