Low-Latency Edge Servers Power the World's First Athletic Mixed Reality Arena
Written in collaboration with
Arcadia.tv
Key Highlights
Arcadia's arena-scale mixed reality experience required a server deployed at the closest possible edge location the moment a session began, not a pre-warmed instance sitting idle. Edgegap's just-in-time orchestration across 615+ locations worldwide ensured a server was spun up on-demand, exactly where and when it was needed, keeping costs low between sessions while delivering instantly when athletes stepped into the arena.
When athletes are physically running, jumping, and competing in a shared real-world space, even minor network delays break immersion and fairness. Edgegap's patented decision-making system automatically places servers at the optimal edge location for each session, delivering the sub-50ms latency that Arcadia's real-time player synchronization demands.
The Studio
Arcadia.TV built the world's first stadium-sized mixed reality arena, where athletes physically run, jump, and compete, their real-world movements directly controlling their in-game avatars. Powered by their proprietary SAMOS arena, the platform synchronizes all players with one another and with the physical environment in real time, creating a shared multiplayer experience unlike anything in traditional gaming or sports. Designed to be broadcast to global audiences, Arcadia's games blend classic arcade inspiration with modern competitive sport.
The Challenge
Arcadia's experience presented an infrastructure problem unlike most multiplayer games. With all players physically present in a single arena, the platform needed to synchronize athletes in real time as they ran, jumped, and competed in the same shared virtual space. Any latency or desync translated directly into a broken physical experience, an athlete dodging a collision that the game had not yet registered, or a competitive outcome undermined by lag. At the same time, Arcadia's event-driven model meant servers sat unused between sessions, making traditional pre-warmed, always-on infrastructure an expensive and impractical fit.
The Solution
With all players physically bound to a single arena location, server proximity was non-negotiable. Edgegap's regionless edge network allowed Arcadia to deploy a dedicated game server on-demand at the ideal location the moment a session started, without pre-warming capacity or paying for idle infrastructure between events. The result was the real-time synchronization that an experience where athletes tackle each other in a virtual world simply cannot do without.
