Horizon
Meta

• The first phase produces a mirror world consisting of large-scale and high-fidelity digital twins of humans and things in virtual environments, aimed for a vivid digital repres  entation of the physical reality. In this phase, virtual activities and properties such as user emotion and movement are imitations of their physical counterparts, where reality and virtuality are two parallel spaces. 
• The second phase mainly focuses on the native content creation, where digital natives represented by avatars can produce innovations and insights inside the digital worlds and these digital creations may only exist in the virtual spaces. In this phase, the massively created contents in the digital world become equal with their physical counterparts, and the digital world has the ability to transform and innovate the production process of the physical world, thereby creating more intersections between these two worlds. 
• The metaverse grows to its maturity in the last phase and turns into a persistent and self-sustaining surreality world which assimilates the reality into itself. The seamless integration and mutual symbiosis of physical and virtual worlds will be realized in this phase, where the scope of the virtual world will be larger than that of the real world and more scenes and lives that do not exist in reality can exist in virtual realms.

• combination of real and virtual worlds
• real-time interaction
• accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects

• marker-based (image recognition of discernible markers)
• marker-less (location-based  device's sensor suite)
• projection-based (tactically cast onto physical surfaces)
• superimposition-based (nuanced substitution of real-world views with digitally manipulated counterparts)
• recognition-based (identifying and tracking specific objects or images, enabling the contextual overlay of pertinent digital augmentations)
• SLAM (combines real-time environmental mapping with simultaneous localization tracking)
• wearable (hands-free, immersive digital experience delivered through smart glasses or headsets)
• web-based (allowing users to access augmented experiences directly through web browsers)

• Non-immersive systems are the simplest and cheapest type of VR applications that use desktops to reproduce images of the world.
• Immersive systems provide a complete simulated experience due to the support of several sensory outputs devices such as head mounted displays (HMDs) for enhancing the stereoscopic view of the environment through the movement of the user’s head, as well as audio and haptic devices.
• Semi-immersive systems such as Fish Tank VR are between the two above. They provide a stereo image of a three dimensional (3D) scene viewed on a monitor using a perspective projection coupled to the head position of the observer. Higher technological immersive systems have showed a closest experience to reality, giving to the user the illusion of technological nonmediation and feeling him or her of “being in” or present in the virtual environment. Furthermore, higher immersive systems, than the other two systems, can give the possibility to add several sensory outputs allowing that the interaction and actions were perceived as real .

• Nothing is more practical than a good theory!
• What is real about virtual reality?  There is nothing virtual about immersion! 
• Budućnost VR je negde između utopistične i apokaliptične krajnosti konvergencije virtualnosti i stvarnosti!?
• The first step: 3D social spaces and storyliving...

• 1957: The first attempts at immersive technology came in the 1950s. A cinematographer called Morton Heilig invented a theater cabinet device that offered users an immersive experience that included video, scent, and touch.
• 1962: the first 3D immersive simulator was Morton Heilig Sensorama, a simulated experience of a motorcycle running through Brooklyn characterized by several sensory impressions, such as audio, olfactory, and haptic stimuli, including also wind to provide a realist experience.
• 1962: In 1962, two Philco Corporation engineers created the first known head-mounted display (HMD). The product was called the Headsight, and it contained two video screens and a magnetic tracking device. Its primary use was to move a remote camera so users could experience a live space without being physically present.
• 1966: In 1966, the Air Force built the first flight simulator. This tech was one of the most promising applications of VR because of its potential as a training aid for pilots.
• 1968: “The Sword of Damocles” becomes the first head-mounted AR/VR display
• 1978: “The Aspen Movie Map” was invented at MIT. It allowed users to interact with a video that simulated driving around Aspen.
• 1982: The movie Tron is released, which ignites the public’s appetite for immersive technologies.
• 1986: The Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator (VCASS) was invented. At the time, it was a state-of-the-art flight simulator.
• 1987: The term “virtual reality” was coined by John Lanier (term "Augmented Reality" was officially coined in 1990 by a Boeing researcher created the first prototype of AR system for showing to employees how set up a wiring tool)
• 1991: The Virtuality Group and Sega both built VR headsets; however, Sega’s version never saw the light of day.

1.  social VR spaces 
2. storytelling->storyliving in residential communities 
3.  digital twin for human (physical/intelligent/social identity, personality, autonomy, ego, uniqueness)

• absolute space (media is best enjoyed when the consumer is resting in one place)
• absolute time (content offered at predetermined times according to programmer’s schedule)
• one platform (dedicated devices for individual applications)
• passivity rules ( no effort required to view)
• portability emerges but is bulky or delivers inferior experience (personalization is limited)

• no absolute space (media will be enjoyed in any place the consumer desires; portability and mobility are key )
• no absolute time (media will be enjoyed at any time, on demand, according to the user’s schedule)
• multiple platform (converged devices enable multiple media applications)
• interactivity rules ( consumer is part of the experience)
• programming done by the consumer (content increasingly accessed on demand with customized playlists and experience)

• Historically, PSM have delivered content with shared experiences in mind. These experiences could be shared in the first degree, sitting together in the living room; or at a secondary level, providing common subjects to discuss at work or social gatherings with friends and family.
• This is the direct opposite of what the online tech giants are doing today. Their aim is to isolate each user, making it easier to extract valuable data and to target advertising. Essentially, they work to control the ‘loyalty’ of each individual citizen to their own personal content or information offer.
• While personalization does have a role to play for PSM, the fundamental goal must be to develop and distribute content so that people can benefit from it collectively, whether at home or wherever people may gather. This is an area where PSM have a structural social advantage that must be defended and renewed.

• detection and tracking
• pose estimation
• recognition of action
• applications

• Concept of time as a sequence of things happening one after the other is a critical pillar for our understanding of upcoming virtual existence. When the time was proven to be relative to the acceleration of the observer, revisiting all the Newtonian concepts of absolute time, brought upon a new understanding of the universe around us. How will time move within the virtual world?Will days, months, and years have different cycles in the metaverse, much like they are calculated differently in other planets or will the metaverse prove to be timeless blending past present, and future all in one, or be motionless?
• The discussion about space is an integral part of the time pillar and questions we have raised in that segment are also valid for this segment. Our interaction with the physicalworld and its three dimensions has clear boundaries. Adding time as a fourth dimension to our physical existence does not change the boundaries it feeds right into the Cartesian way of thinking established by Descartes. In fact, the principle of Descartes is the closest ally any discussion on Metaverse should include. The struggle to understand where the body (physical) and the mind (metaphysical) interact and how consciousness arises from the interaction had been a key research area for Cartesians. Understanding the individual and the indivisible mind will propose a great challenge in our search for the impacts of immersing ourselves into the Metaverse where the body is divided into being in the real world and in the virtual world.

Augmented and Virtual Reality in Industry 5.0

Application of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in Industry 5.0 is a comprehensive reference source that will provide personalized, accessible, and welldesigned experiences. AR and VR are finding accelerated adoption in this new normal. It will be a key part of how people access the metaverse – the next iteration of the internet. A few breakthrough use cases have entered early consumer adoption, such as gaming, fitness, and social, as hardware devices have become more affordable. 

There isn’t a single industry that does not employ augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) in some way. This technology’s applicability has already spanned a wide range of industries. It will soon infiltrate regions that no one could have predicted. Technology behemoths are already putting money, effort, and time into AR/VR integration. As this technology advances and expands, it is vital that everyone understands the numerous uses of AR and VR, as well as their entire potential. Numerous applications of AR and VR that improve industrial skills and decision-making are gaining traction. The exponential growth of ARenabling technology boosts support for Industry 5.0 service enhancement. Meanwhile, in many industry-wide advances and real-time applications, practical difficulties of AR and VR play a key role in building cognitive tools and analytics.

The influence of AR/VR on artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be set as significant. The next generation of AR/VR gadgets will deliver customized, accessible, and well-designed experiences. However, more effort is needed before these technologies become broadly used, which is addressed in this book via multiple chapters under Industry 5.0, as future AR/VR gadgets will give customized, accessible, and welldesigned experiences. In this new normal, AR and VR are gaining traction. People’s access to the metaverse – the next generation of the internet – will be aided by AR/ VR. As hardware devices are more inexpensive, a few groundbreaking use cases, including gaming, fitness, and social, have seen early market acceptance.

Opportunities and challenges for the financial services industry

As a new paradigm interconnecting the physical and virtual realms, the metaverse brings the prospect of reshaping the financial services landscape. ‘The metaverse’ broadly refers to a network of immersive virtual worlds, created using a range of frontier technologies to mirror or transform real-world experiences. Regulators and policymakers across the globe are increasingly conscious of this technology, recognising the importance of achieving a balance between harnessing the potential of the metaverse and effectively managing its challenges to ensure its healthy development in the financial services industry.

The popular vision for the metaverse is characterised by immersiveness, persistency, heterogeneity, and interoperability. A range of enabling technologies, including network infrastructure, computing infrastructure, sensing technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, and distributed ledger technologies, underpin the construction of the metaverse to foster seamless and creative interactions, as well as facilitate commercial and financial activities. The development of the metaverse may bring new business opportunities to the financial services industry by driving demand for virtual financial services and enhancing business operations. It can further promote financial literacy through interactive education experiences. However, the metaverse may expose the financial services industry to new risks or magnify existing ones in the digital age. These developments highlight the important role played by regulators in monitoring the responsible development of the metaverse, ensuring financial stability whilst encouraging innovation in the financial services industry.

This finding indicates that local financial institutions are inclined to leverage the metaverse as an additional channel to promote interactions with the public, customers, and employees. Nonetheless, the surveyed financial institutions expressed less enthusiasm towards certain applications of the metaverse as an investment tool, sales channel, and revenue stream and the provision of metaversespecific products and services. These suggest that the rights, cybersecurity and data privacy, and financial transactions. 

Technological advancements play a pivotal role in facilitating the transition to a full-fledged metaverse ecosystem. The surveyed market participants acknowledged the significance of network technology, display hardware, computing technology, and blockchain technology in accelerating metaverse development. Nonetheless, it is crucial to address the associated challenges, such as data privacy concerns, constraints in platform functionalities, elevated costs associated with development and maintenance and complexities in integrating the metaverse with existing operations and systems. Moreover, as the metaverse encompasses a multitude of innovative technologies connected to virtual assets and the Web3 ecosystem, it is equally important to formulate timely regulatory measures and closely monitor their developments. Relevant regulatory initiatives have been introduced both internationally and in Hong Kong to protect consumers and foster a conducive and safe environment for the digital ecosystem.

Merging of artificial intelligence (AI), artificial life (AL) and virtual reality

Technology has been rightly called the wave of the future. Artificial intelligence (AI), artificial life (AL) and virtual reality (VR) are not exactly new terms, and it has been a while since we have been experiencing how these technologies are leading us to convergence. VR lets us produce simulated environments that we can then submerge ourselves into, AI is working towards outfitting technical devices and services with the help of insight and perception of a responsive being and thought, while AL is the art of examining natural life and humans through simulations with computer models, robotics and biochemistry. Major advances can be made to merge these three technologies to bring about a revolution in the world we live in. Bringing AI, AL and VR together can provide us with incredible opportunities in various domains like travel and tourism, lifestyle, healthcare, BFSI, retail, entertainment and many more. This chapter revolves around the various cases of using AI to augment the existing applications and the many areas where AI, AL and VR can be applied.

Large language models

Large language models (LLMs) are deep learning models (a subset of machine learning models) that are pre-trained using vast amounts of data. Analysing these massive datasets enables the LLM to learn probability relationships and become proficient in the grammar and syntax of one or more languages. LLMs generate coherent and context-relevant language. To put it simply, LLMs respond to human language by producing coherent text that appears human-like. Most recent LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT models are based on a neural network architecture called a transformer model. Prompts refer to the input of data subjects when interacting with LLMs such as ChatGPT as well as file uploads and the user feedback regarding the quality of the data output (the responses). GPT systems are general-purpose AI models according to the definition laid down by Article 3(63) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.

What Is Metaverse in 6G?

The term “Metaverse” is coined with transcendence (meta) and universe (verse) terms which represent the next-generation immersive interaction between digital and physical worlds through digital avatars of users by augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) equipment and the integration of variety of technologies. This may also turn into the next-generation Internet that embraces a social element. It will be accelerated through many novel technologies such as digital twins, networking, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Web 3.0, AR/VR/XR, blockchain, and nonfungible token (NFT). AMetaverse platform may include multiple segments such as networking infrastructure, human interfaces, decentralized technologies, spatial computing techniques, creator economy, discovery tools, and the types of experience.

With the advancement of wearable devices and their adjacent sensors and actuators and the advanced learning algorithms, they provide the projections of human interactions and movements from the physical world to the digital world. This allows the human users to fully control their digital avatars which are interacting with the other avatars and objects in the Metaverse easily. In order to make this Metaverse platform a reality, the 6G networking infrastructure together withmany ML algorithms are expected to support (and not limited to) traffic off-loading, security attack prevention, fault detection, channel estimation, automatic resource allocation, and efficient spectrum monitoring.

There are two main standards related to Metaverse architecture: ISO/IEC 23005 and IEEE 2888. These explain how the sensory data fromthe real world are converted into the virtual world for its object characteristics. The general architecture for Metaverse is proposed as a convergence of digital, physical, and human worlds, with the characteristics such as 3D immersive virtual shared space, hyper spatiotemporality, and self-sustainability. Metaverse is a human-centric paradigm which allows humans to generate their digital avatars in a synthesized digital world and to use their digital identities through smart devices to play, work, socialize, or communicate. Physical infrastructure provides the Metaverse to support many services such as sensor data perception, transmission, data storage, caching, and processing. They facilitate the human users to interact with Metaverse engines through interactivity,AI, digital twin, and blockchain technologies. Then the digital worlds can be composed as interconnected virtual worlds which include users as digital avatars and different types of virtual goods/services.

When Metaverse is bringing together virtual and digital worlds to the economic interactions of human world through the physical infrastructure, it exhibits several key features with the perspectives of immersiveness, hyper-spatio-temporality, sustainability, interoperability, scalability, and heterogeneity.

• Immersiveness: This is the virtual space generated by the computers and digital appliances with a nearly realistic atmosphere where users can be mentally and emotionally immersed. It allows the humans to interact with the environment through their bodies, senses, and expressions.

• Hyper spatiotemporality: The users may no longer feel the finiteness of the real world and the irreversibility limitations of time. In a Metaverse, the users can freely travel across space and experience the difference of spatiotemporal dimensions.

• Sustainability: The Metaverse is expected to maintain the persistence in a decentralized networking paradigm to allow the coexistence of multiple underlying technologies to collaborate with different types of stakeholders.

• Interoperability: The users can freely move across virtual worlds or the submetaverses without being interrupted in the immersive experience. Digital assets are expected to reconstruct the virtual worlds in such a way to facilitate the interchangeability across different platforms.

• Scalability: Metaverse should have the capacity to withstand with the increment and complexity of concurrent users or avatars and maintain their interactions in terms of scope, type, and range. 

• Heterogeneity: This stands for the heterogeneous virtual spaces, physical devices, communication modes, and data types which will contribute to metaverse to accommodate a diversified human psychology.

The metaverse is coming: 

An immersive, interoperable and synchronous digital world that will change how we interact, work and play :-)

The metaverse: consumer, enterprise and industrial

The emergence of a new spatial computing medium, and the applications that will take advantage of its capabilities to pierce the physical-digital divide, is imminent. The metaverse has struggled under the weight of ever-expanding definitions and expectations, but the value in the technology behind it has never been in doubt. Although often represented as a single all-encompassing digital world, the metaverse can be viewed as three distinct sectors: consumer, enterprise and industrial. The pace at which each of these sectors will evolve is uncertain, but all analyses project rapid growth for the industrial metaverse and its enabling technologies within the next decade.

• The consumer metaverse focuses primarily on the social, entertainment and educational experiences of individuals. Leveraging capabilities like interactive product launches, immersive settings and tokenized experiences unlocks new avenues to boost brand engagement, purchase experience and customer loyalty. The earlier report, Demystifying the Consumer Metaverse, provides further insight into consumer-facing metaverse applications, routes to value and how industry players can realize the economic opportunity through traditional and entirely new business models.

• The enterprise metaverse virtualizes working engagement, learning, communication and collaboration across distances, forming new ways of working. Instead of mundane instructional videos, employees can practise and apply skills in a real-time immersive setting alongside others. This applies to everything from learning culture and core values during employee onboarding to practising complex, high-risk and hazardous scenarios in a safer virtual space.

• The industrial metaverse focuses on how digital information and AI are used to optimize interactions between people, physical goods, production assets, places, processes, supply chains, operations, field services and equipment, and industrial environments. Immersive technologies enable bidirectional knowledge flow between the physical and virtual worlds. This can transform analyses of past activities and future predictions at strategic and operational levels across manufacturing, industries, government functions or processes where the link between the physical and virtual is important. The goal is to bring software agility to the physical world’s complexity while enabling remote collaboration. 

Regulating the Metaverse: a critical assesment

The metaverse seems to be on everybody’s lips – and yet, very few people can actually explain what it means or why it is important. This book aims to fill the gap from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by law and media and communications studies. Going beyond the optimism emanating from technology companies and venture capitalists, the authors critically evaluate the antecedents and the building blocks of the metaverse, the design and regulatory challenges that need to be solved, and commercial opportunities that are yet to be fully realised. While the metaverse is poised to open new possibilities and perspectives, it will also be a dangerous place – one ripe with threats ranging from disinformation to intellectual property theft to sexual harassment. Hence, the book offers a useful guide to the legal and political governance issues ahead while also contextualising them within the broader domain of governance and regulation of digital technologies. 

The aim of this book is to examine the many shades of grey within ongoing trends and practices, business endeavours, regulatory attempts, and future projections to paint a realistic picture of the metaverse. In doing so, it ultimately transpires that, despite the innovations involved, the metaverse remains firmly rooted in (mostly) the same human habits and traits as are current technologies and will likely continue many of the same business practices and corporate models that characterise the current platform ecosystem (often deepening them even further). No doubt, the metaverse is promising, there are opportunities for individuals and businesses, and it very likely represents the future. However, it also deserves a look from outside the hype bubble. This is exactly what this book strives to achieve.

The book opens with a consideration of the context, trends, and theoretical assumptions pertaining to the metaverse and setting a path for its emergence and further development. Subsequently, both the reasons behind the metaverse hype and its potential shortcomings are outlined, thereby aiming to provide a fair and balanced account of this virtual world of worlds. Next, the discussion moves to the metaverse economy, connecting entrepreneurial opportunities and transformations of social and personal life that together constitute new earning potential for companies and individuals while simultaneously reproducing some of the more troubling current online trends. The latter theme, although with a more pronounced emphasis on social theory, is continued into the penultimate substantial chapter of the book, presenting the changes to individual and social life brought about by the metaverse as part of a broader posthuman turn. Such changes also unavoidably bring about questions of governance and the way norms are set and enforced. Accordingly, the second part of that chapter focuses precisely on the issues of power and control of the metaverse. Finally, the last substantive chapter is dedicated to the intersection of threats and regulation while elucidating both continuity and change in the threat landscape.

The capacity to immerse is natural to humans and can be traced back at least to literature. Nevertheless, more recently, there has been a shift to turn online as much of daily life as possible, ultimately leading to the dominance of digital media logics across the whole society. A corollary is, then, the centrality of data collection and analytics in daily life, meaning that human presence is increasingly inseparable from algorithms and other digital artefacts. In this way, conditions are created for turning almost the entirety of human life into data. Such datafication, nevertheless, does not take place independently – instead, it primarily takes place through platforms as key units of social life and economic activity. And, while platformisation is already changing societies in a way that is comparable with the transformations brought about by industrialisation and electrification, its full potential to datafy and structure daily lives can only be realised through the metaverse. This is why the latter must be seen as the next stage of platformisation – an evolution of today’s technologically mediated world and not a revolution.

MetaVERSE

Meta-stvarnost: mi smo samo priče koje pričamo sebi :-)

Možda naš najveći talenat je pripovedanje. Od kada smo otkrili vatru i okupili se oko nje, mediji se menjaju ali priče su i dalje prozor u fantaziju. Ljudi raspolažu iskustvom u kreiranju i doživljavanju drugih svetova. Naše knjige, film, pozorište, TV serije i uloge koje proigravamo su do neke mere kreativan pokušaj proširenja granica našeg okruženja. Upotreba digitalnih računara za simuliranje novog sveta je sledeći logičan korak, a možda i poslednji?! Jednog dana u budućnosti imaćemo nov izbor, najveću priliku za bekstvo. Prvi korak je virtuelna stvarnost (VR) koja je u povojima ali razvijaće se da naša čula veruju svakom pogledu, zvuku, dodiru, mirisu i ukusu u simuliranim okruženjima koja selektujemo. Novi meta-univerzum predstavljaće beskonačnu stvarnost, gde mi i naš Avatar možemo da delujemo sve dok smo uključeni u VR svet. I u sledećem koraku razvoja zadržaćemo svoj identitet ali postojaćemo beskonačno samo kao računarski digitalni signal u kolektivnom Oblaku jednog zajedničkog medijskog prostora. Izgleda da ne postoji ograničenje da stvorimo deljenu, zajedničku virtuelnu stvarnost veličine naše planete!?

Is the metaverse possible? [LC, 2023}

I do not know if, how and when the metaverse will “happen”, but I do know why it should happen. That is because the metaverse can be considered as the ultimate step of the 100-year-old digitisation process, it will bring new forms of human-human and human-machine interaction and will “remove” some of the daily-life “constraints” of the physical world (provided our bodies stay on the Earth…).

But I am not a blind believer in the metaverse because of the many hurdles lying ahead. There are some interoperability hurdles that lie between us and a realised metaverse and need measures for each of them.

First hurdle: we should make sure that we agree on what we talk about. The lack of an agreed definition of the metaverse betrays a language problem, similar to the Tower of Babel’s. 

The first hurdle anticipates the next, namely, the lack of an agreed metaverse terminology.

The next suggestion is a consequence of the above: make sure that we agree on the meaning of words. It is so interesting to observe that everybody agrees on the importance of terminology and that explains why we have so many metaverse terminologies. The words used to indicate notions important for the metaverse are not important per se – the terminology could designate avatar with the label A4BC – the fact is that a term reflects the metaverse model that people have in mind.

This leads us to the next hurdle: we do not have a common terminology because we do not have a common metaverse model. Hence the next suggestion: when you talk about interoperability make sure that your interlocutor shares the same metaverse model as you. 

This leads us to the next hurdle: we do not have a common terminology because we do not have a common metaverse model. Hence the next suggestion: when you talk about interoperability make sure that your interlocutor shares the same metaverse model as you. 

The conclusion is that there are potentially many ways to interoperate. They are mostly driven by business considerations and depend on where you place the interface where data are exchanged.

My final recommendation has been that you are either interoperable by design, or you interoperate either because the rest of the world has adopted your solution, or because you have been forced to adopt someone else’s solution. Interoperability by design offer a level playground. The problem is that there are no interoperability specifications. 

The conclusions that I remain a believer in a metaverse where people can fully express themselves with people who can fully express themselves but I do not guarantee that this will be possible because an interoperable approach to the metaverse is required.

Concept of the Metaverse

Metaverse is also named the postulated universe, metaphysical universe, metaverse, supersensible space, or virtual space. It is a persistent and decentralized online 3D virtual environment, and all events in the metaverse occur in real-time and have a permanent impact. The term metaverse is made up of the prefix meta (beyond) and the ending -verse of the word metaverse, abbreviated as MVS. Prefix meta indicates something that describes itself or another thing in an encompassing or more abstract way. In technology, the word meta has been used to signify a positive change toward the future. 

There is no precise definition of metaverse. Still, Wikipedia describes the metaverse as follows: a metaverse is a future Internet-based, connected, perceptual, and shared 3D virtual space characterized by convergence and physical persistence through virtual, augmented physical reality. It is a 3D virtual space with connected perception and shared characteristics. 

In 1992, a science fiction novel called Snow Crash was published. In this book, author Neal Stephenson first mentioned the concept of a metaverse. The metaverse world described in Snow Crash is a virtual shared space parallel to the real world. The metaverse constructed in the novel is created by the fusion of the real world with powerful virtual technology and the virtual world based on digital technology. 

A complete metaverse world requires strong technical support to ensure that the metaverse world is not just a concept in novels and movies. The technology of a single domain cannot build a complete metaverse form; the interplay of many advanced technologies is the cornerstone of building a metaverse.

Concept of community

A community is simply a group of people, but it needs to have some expression. The community here refers to location-based communities such as local communities, villages, towns, cities, regions, or even countries or identity-based communities such as geo-groups, sub-cultures, races, religions, multiculturalism, or even multiple civilizations. Community members have consistent behavioral norms, ongoing interactions, and a division of labor among members with the ability to act in concert.

To put it simply, a traditional community is a group or organization formed by people with unified values, a group of people with shared pursuits, common ideals, shared goals, and common interests.

Social activities emerged with the birth of human society, and the medium of human communication has been innovated throughout history. Thus, human social activities have also been constantly reshaped with the change in the medium of interaction. With the rise of the Internet era, the way people socialize has changed, from the prolonged carriage and horses and distant letters in the past to various platforms where people can socialize nowadays, and people’s socialization has become colorful.

Digital Life in the Metaverse

Digital life is a new form of life created using a computer medium, an artificial system with natural life characteristics or behaviors. Digital life studies are those artificial life studies that use computers as a medium and computer programs as living individuals. In the metaverse, people participate in the digital world as digital identities. It is not the real world but a virtual world of space-time and numbers.

The digital identity in the metaverse is unique. The identification module will be built into the protocol, and complementary applications will be developed. Users will have autonomy over their self-independent identity, meaning they fully control their personally identifiable information and therefore do not need to rely on any third party for identity verification. With a truly autonomous identity, users can create, sign, and verify statements on their own, and parties interacting with them will be able to verify their identity. In addition, users will be able to disclose their information selectively. Digital identities are integral to the virtual world and can take many forms, such as individuals or value intermediaries (institutions and entities). Thus, users can have different digital identities in other contexts (e.g., workplace identity and personal identity), but they are ultimately based on the user’s real identity

Virtual vs. physical distances

Physical distance is generally the shortest connecting length between two points in space simultaneously. Under physical distance, people usually consider many factors when traveling, including distance, time, money, weather, etc. Distance is the prominent factor people think about. But in the metaverse, people do not have to consider the distance. 

The core of the metaverse is not only to be visually infinitely close to reality but, more importantly, to the real universe in terms of laws as well. In the real universe, living and non-living bodies change over time, appearing to be separate wholes. Still, their essence is composed of smaller units, so the modeling means as the underlying facilities need to consider whether they can meet the demand. The current modeling means are mainly 3D modeling and voxel modeling.

Games and socialization

Modern life has gradually become inseparable from games and social networking, which can enrich our spiritual world and even accompany us for a long time in the metaverse. With the development of technology, games are becoming more and more creative, and we can create our worlds and communities in games and social software.

Metaverse and digital asset

Thanks to the development of VR/AR, application 5G, and artificial intelligence technologies, the improvement of hardware facilities supporting wearable devices, blockchain technology has revolutionized the traditional economic system, and the virtual world in the novel Snow Crash and the movie Top Gun is coming to us. This emerging world has a uniquene worder: it can provide users with a highly immersive experience based on virtual reality and interactive technology, generate a mirror image of the real world based on digital twin technology, and build an economic system based on blockchain technology. In the metaverse world, it is possible to closely integrate the virtual world with the real world regarding economic, social, and identity systems, allowing each user to produce and edit content. In real life, each person has to work and contribute to get recognition and receive direct and indirect benefits. The same is true in the virtual world, where people can work together for metaverse governance, participate in social activities, buy assets using an exclusive currency, and buy and sell assets to earn currency. The digital financial system is an integral part of the metaverse world, a key factor in enhancing the user experience, and an important driver to attract more people to participate in building the metaverse.

There is no uniform and precise definition of digital assets at home and abroad. Still, according to the definition of digital assets, digital assets are non-monetary assets in the form of electronic data owned or controlled by enterprises, which are held for sale in daily life or the production process, and usually include data assets, digital currency assets, and digital intellectual property assets. They typically have data, digital currency, and intellectual property assets.

Focusing on the digital assets in the metaverse, based on the wealth aggregation and circulation effect of blockchain technology, most assets in real life can be migrated to the blockchain, digitized and encrypted through blockchain technology, and eventually circulated in a decentralized, peer-to-peer blockchain network. Therefore, in a virtual world like the metaverse, where everyone participates, each item has uniqueness and can be uniquely held.

Virtual real estate is the real estate created in the metaverse project based on blockchain’s NFT technology, which has a maximum number and distinctions such as location and size. Buyers have real ownership and can build houses, showcase their products, conduct business, and social activities, etc., on virtual land after purchasing it, just like in the real world. The ownership of virtual real estate is recorded through the blockchain land ledger, which proves the holder of the digital asset of the relevant plot of land, similar to the real estate certificate, and all the information is stored in the Ethereum smart contract, which is an irreplaceable and non-transferable digital asset.

Metaverse and Law

The metaverse is a mapping of the real world and can cover an extensive range of industries. Building a metaverse does not simply rely on one technology. Still, it requires the synergy of multiple technologies and the integration of new technologies into various industries, which will inevitably have many problems. Metaverse is considered to be the next major technological revolution. To build a new virtual space different from the real world, some forward-looking research is essential, and how to build a new order is the first important issue to be considered. Problems such as identity fraud, intellectual property rights, regulatory review, and datasecuritywillariseinthemetaverse’sdevelopment andgradualmaturityprocess. Therefore, itis contingent, necessary, and urgent toprevent and solve the legal issues arising from the metaverse. To this end, legislation, law enforcement, and justice in digital technology, data, algorithms, transactions, taxation, and property rights should be followed up promptly. 

The original meaning of order refers to an organized and uncluttered situation, which is the opposite of disorder. The dictionary defines the arrangement or disposition of people or things about each other according to a particular sequence, pattern, or method. From the jurisprudence’s point of view, the American jurist Bodenheimer believes that order means a certain degree of consistency, continuity, and certainty in both natural and social processes. Generally, the order can be divided into the natural and social orders. The natural order is governed by the laws of nature, such as sunrise and sunset, etc. Social order is constructed and maintained by social rules, which refers to the relatively stable relationship pattern, structure, and state formed by people in long-term social interaction. From the current market promotion opinion, the metaverse is objective, open-source, dynamic evolution, user demand-oriented, and essentially an artificial virtual world, which will involve multiple social relationships, multi-subject participation, an extended operation chain, and diversified risk thresholds. Because it is a pluralistic social relationship, it needs a large area of rules coverage and even the construction of the superstructure of law.

Legal relationship refers to the social relationship with the form of legal rights and obligations formed in the process of adjusting people’s behavior to legal norms. In terms of its subjective formal features, it belongs to the category of superstructure. In terms of its social content, it includes social relations in various fields such as politics, economy, and culture. It comprises three elements: subject, content, and object. Man is the subject of the metaverse, his activities are still regulated by law, and he bears the corresponding responsibilities and risks based on his actions. When a person exists as a subject in the metaverse, the object, matter, or subject matter to which their rights and obligations are directed can be called the legal object in the metaverse. 

Future of the Metaverse

Based on advanced technology, the metaverse will be an all-encompassing digital playground. With technological innovation, all walks of life will usher in new development opportunities. The blueprint for a new era of digital information revolution sketched out in the metaverse has attracted a lot of attention from industries, especially the Internet. As the future of Internet technology, people have a lot of expectations for the metaverse. Based on the support of solid technology clusters, immortality technology may no longer be an imaginary concept. And in a technologically savvy future scenario, building a metaverse will also face many problems. 

The metaverse will revolutionize the way people use the Internet to communicate and interact. However, there are some problems associated with the construction of the metaverse. As described in the previous section, this covers the data security and investment security issues inherent in the Internet domain. In addition, it may create new problems beyond the scope of existing cognition. 

Cultural, legal, and ethical issues

Although the metaverse is a virtual space that mirrors the real world, the emerging things, such as Digital Life accompanying it, will create new norms and cultures. It is also unknown whether the new culture will erode the existing human culture or give rise to legal and moral issues beyond the current human cognition.

Metaverse: opportunities, risks and policy implications

One of the most talked about concepts in modern technology, the metaverse can be described as an immersive and constant virtual 3D world where people interact by means of an avatar to carry out a wide range of activities. Such activities can range from leisure and gaming to professional and commercial interactions, financial transactions or even health interventions such as surgery. While the exact scope and impact of the metaverse on society and on the economy is still unknown, it can already be seen that the metaverse will open up a range of opportunities but also a number of risks in a variety of policy areas.

Major tech companies are scaling up their metaverse activities, including through mergers and acquisitions. This has given impetus to a debate on how merger regulations and antitrust law should apply. Business in the metaverse is expected to be underpinned largely by cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, raising issues of ownership, misuse, interoperability and portability. Furthermore, the huge volume of data used in the metaverse raises a number of data protection and cybersecurity issues (e.g. how to collect user consent or protect avatars against identity theft).

There is considerable scope for a wide range of illegal and harmful behaviours and practices in the metaverse environment. This makes it essential to consider how to attribute responsibility, inter alia, for fighting illegal and harmful practices and misleading advertising practices, and for protecting intellectual property rights. Moreover, digital immersion in the metaverse can have severe negative impacts on health, especially for vulnerable groups, such as minors, who may require special protection. Finally, the accessibility and inclusiveness of the metaverse remain areas where progress has still to be made in order to create an environment of equal opportunities.

Characteristics of the Metaverse

The metaverse is a virtual space parallel to the real world. Since it is still in development and improvement, different groups have different definitions. But in general, there is a relatively unified view on its function, core elements and spiritual attributes that embody realistic emotions. 

• From a functional perspective, it can be used for open social virtual experiences such as games, shopping, creation, display, education, and transactions. At the same time, it can be used for virtual currency transactions and converted into real currency, thus forming a complete virtual economic system. 

• Its core elements include the ultimate immersive experience, a rich content ecology, a super-temporal social system, and an economic system of virtual and real interaction. In addition, because the Metaverse can carry out an immersive interactive experience, it can entrust the emotions of real people and give users a sense of psychological belonging, so it also has the function of carrying the spiritual back garden of real people.

Based on the concept and functions of the metaverse, it mainly has the following characteristics: sociality, rich content, immersive experience, and integrity of the economic system.

• Sociability is manifested in that the metaverse can break through the boundaries of the physical world, form more relevant groups and ethnicities based on new identities and roles in the virtual world, and interact with social interaction in the real world.

• The richness of content is shown in the fact that the metaverse may contain multiple sub-universes, such as education sub-universe, social sub-universe, game sub-universe and so on. In addition, the user’s in-depth free creation and continuous content update make its connotation constantly enriched, thereby promoting selfevolution.

• The immersive experience is manifested in the fact that Metaverse is based on rich interface tools and engines, which can generate a real sense of immersive experience while ensuring low user access standards. In addition, the R&D and application of related experience devices, such as VR/AR/MR, have developed rapidly, which can further enhance the immersive experience of the Metaverse.

• The integrity of the economic system is reflected in the fact that users can earn income by doing tasks or creative activities in the virtual system, and these virtual income can be exchanged with real currency to realize realization. In addition, the economic system of Metaverse is a decentralized system based on blockchain, and users’ income can be better guaranteed without being affected by the centralized platform.

Digital reality

The focus of IEEE Digital Reality is on Digital Transformation, which is fueled, among others, by advances in technology, such as sensors and actuators, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). By leveraging these technologies and others being developed, such as eXtended Reality (XR) and Digital Twins, the line between the physical world and the digital world will be increasingly less distinct, leading to Metaverse.

The IEEE Digital Reality is actively pursuing the following goals:

• IEEE to be recognized as the leader in facilitating disruptive technological innovations and fostering cross-industry collaborations globally and taking into account societal impact.

• Position IEEE at the center of Digital Transformation, fueled by advances in Digital Twins, AR, VR, MR, and Metaverse plus AI/ML.

• Investigate the impact of the massive growth of "intelligence at the edge” resulting from IoT and the embedding of intelligence into devices, as well as from the cooperation of human and machine intelligence (including co-bots) that is likely to result in a revolution in infrastructures (6G) and in the creation of ambient intelligence encompassing various domains (manufacturing, healthcare and wellbeing, transportation, etc.)

• IEEE Digital Reality Exchange (DRX) will be widely recognized as a trusted repository of Digital Reality suppliers, researchers, practitioners, and project owners.

• Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) will become a key offering for IEEE that leverages knowledge as the enabler of the Digital Transformation.

• Lead a new research frontier, Intelligent Reality, with the launch of the first International Conference on Intelligent Reality (IR), icir.ieee.org.

• Support Societies, OUs on conferences, standards, education.

Intelligent reality

The Intelligent Reality (IR) advances human adoption of integrated Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR), with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, Digital Twins, IoT, Robotics, Blockchain, Wearables, 5G, Internet of Everything etc. It integrates AI-accelerated workflows, complex simulations, advanced visualizations, real-time analytics, and many other components to fuse the physical world with digital spaces, thus, enabling humans and machines to co-exist and leverage each other’s strengths.

The IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR 2022) aims at identifying the challenges and opportunities inherent in deploying intelligent tools and interactive disruptive technologies into immersive environments. It provides a forum for leading researchers, industry professionals, and standards experts to share their research findings and ideas. This year’s theme is “Towards a World of Intelligent Reality”. 

AI in Virtual Reality

One thing that both artificial intelligence and virtual reality technology have in common is that they have been around for longer than people think. While early attempts look little like today’s solutions, both have existed in recognizable form for more than 70 years. AI technology, specifically software-based artificial intelligence, was first created in 1951 at the University of Manchester, in the UK. Two programs were created, one to play checkers and the other to play chess. If we broaden our definition of artificial intelligence, we find history is littered with examples of “automata”, mechanical figures that were capable of simple decision making. Some examples date back thousands of years.

Similarly, virtual reality can be argued to be almost 200 years old, if not older. In 1838, Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscopic viewer, which created the illusion of a 3D scene from pairs of photographs. In 1929, Edward Link built a flight simulator that was used to train pilots prior to World War II. In the 1950s, Morton Heilig developed the Sensorama, an arcade-style cabinet that immersed the viewer in a stereoscopic display with sound, fans to generate wind, and a vibrating chair to simulate motion. In 1965, Ivan Sutherland described the first modern virtual reality system, including the use of a computer to generate the imagery for the system. But, like Artificial Intelligence, if we broaden our definition, we can find examples throughout history that meet the basic criteria of virtual reality: to artificially create a sense of immersion.

In the past decade, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality and augmented reality have all seen rapid development. Computer science breakthroughs like deep learning, and massive collections of training data have yielded impressive results. Outside the realm of AI technology and data science, breakthroughs in optics, display technology, microprocessors and algorithms have all played a role in creating ever-better virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. Consumers can interact with many different types of virtual environment, with or without a VR headset, from video games to virtual tours, to social and educational platforms.

But is there a role for artificial intelligence to play in virtual reality? Do these technologies work well together?

Common uses for AI in virtual reality today

As digital transformation gains momentum, driving technology adoption around the globe, both virtual reality and augmented reality have a role to play. A good virtual reality experience will seamlessly integrate hardware (such as a VR headset), software, and an immersive user experience. The same applies to augmented reality too. Both types of immersive experience make use of artificial intelligence in multiple ways. But in terms of application areas, adoption and usage patterns are quite different. Virtual reality with a headset is more mature than headset-based augmented reality due to the broad availability of inexpensive hardware. However, mobile phone-based augmented reality is far more common than VR.

Similarly, when discussing common uses for AI in virtual reality today, you can find some common threads and some areas of stark difference. To understand how artificial intelligence can evolve in partnership with an application area, it’s useful to look at examples outside the world of virtual reality first.

One of the industries with the longest history of implementing practical artificial intelligence is the video game industry. In video games, AI algorithms were initially used to solve the age-old problem faced by almost all games: the need for an opponent. Simplistic expert systems gave way to more sophisticated artificial intelligence, but the goal was always to provide a player with believable and challenging opponents. But video games now use artificial intelligence in many different ways, such as world building, path finding, data mining and player experience modeling. One particularly interesting application is the use of AI, machine learning and deep learning for content generation. Early work focused on creating environmental elements, music and other components. More recent work has explored the creation and design of entire game levels. Clearly, there is considerable overlap between the games industry and virtual reality. As more video games become available in virtual reality, the tools and techniques used in mainstream games are increasingly being used in VR.

Other examples of AI algorithms at work include Natural Language Processing (NLP). Multiple industries, including virtual shopping, are exploring the use of voice recognition in both virtual reality and augmented reality applications. This type of interaction is heavily reliant on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

A broadly used example of artificial intelligence that can be found in both VR technology and AR technology is computer vision. Using artificial intelligence, one or more camera inputs can be used to provide motion tracking data. This allows the virtual reality or augmented reality experience to seamlessly blend with the user’s perspective. 

One emerging area of AI research is the creation of 3D scenes from single photographs. This technology is still in its infancy, but it could dramatically reduce the cost of creating an immersive experience. Another exciting area is the idea of augmented intelligence—using artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence and make humans more productive. When coupled with virtual reality, or augmented reality, augmented intelligence could deliver spectacular results. For example, imagine designing a product in VR with feedback from an AI that can access detailed knowledge of production methods and limitations. The product designer could avoid potential problems and create optimal designs far more efficiently. 

However, there are limitations on the use of AI in virtual reality and augmented reality. Any VR or AR headset has to make tradeoffs between power consumption, processing power, size, weight, heat and user comfort. AI often requires significant amounts of processing power, which in turn requires more electrical power, adding weight to the headset and generating more heat. Work is being done to develop more energy efficient chipsets for AI, as well as ways to implement AI on low power chipsets. But as new and more advanced applications of AI are constantly emerging, the need to balance power and functionality is likely to be an ongoing challenge for the foreseeable future.

Enhancing virtual reality with AI

There are many ways to enhance virtual reality with AI. One of the most obvious is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to create intelligent, interactive avatars. These are virtual assistants that can understand natural conversation and respond with detailed, and highly customized, assistance. Almost any type of VR experience requires some kind of introduction and user training. Instead of providing this outside of the VR application, why not provide VR training as a VR experience? This is precisely how many video games work. They don’t provide an instruction manual for the player, they throw them straight into an immersive experience and explain the game through actual gameplay. And of course, we don’t need to stop at training for a specific application, we can use the same tools and approach to provide almost any type of training. In VR applications, it is possible to personify training material as an interactive character. When coupled with AI applications, such as natural language processing, sentiment analysis, path finding and others, it’s easy to see how immersive technology could revolutionize training.

Virtual Reality appears to have many useful applications, but training is arguably one of the most important. Training is a perennial problem in many industries. It is often slow, expensive and inefficient. Industries such as manufacturing are facing a rapidly aging workforce. As older workers retire, critical knowledge and experience is being lost. Thanks to Digital Transformation and automation, many menial jobs are disappearing. The new jobs being created increasingly require more advanced skills, which again means we need better training. It seems likely that a VR device, or an AR device, will be a key component of the future of work.

Another technological component that will impact AI is 5G. 5G communication promises high bandwidth, low latency and massive connectivity. This enables new developments in edge and cloud computing that could reduce the data processing demands placed on VR and AR headsets, allowing them to become smaller, lighter and have longer battery life while simultaneously becoming more powerful. When connected to such resources, along with IoT sensors, the possibilities for an immersive, intelligent reality become almost limitless.

Pros and cons of AI in virtual reality

The benefits of using AI in virtual reality and extended reality are clear. They include better user interaction, better user experiences, the possibility to augment human intelligence and human senses, and the ability to drive down the cost of creating an immersive virtual world. Almost any type of VR simulation can be improved through the use of AI technology. Extended reality in all of its forms can create an immersive learning environment, but when coupled with AI, it can become truly compelling. A clear opportunity for AI and extended reality is training. VR training is one application that can help transition human resources to new job opportunities. The same is true of AR training, which has the added advantage of taking place in the real world. Imagine being able to pre-train for any job simply by opening a VR app, putting on a VR device and jumping in.

Of course, AI is not without its challenges. This article previously discussed the problems of processing power and power consumption. But AI has other issues, some of them non-technical in nature. One of the biggest is bias. Any AI tool has the potential to show bias based on the big data sets used to train it. For example, speech recognition tends to work significantly better for some regional accents. There is a very strong correlation between the typical engineer working on speech recognition (male, English speaking, with an American, Indian or Chinese accent), and the accents that get the most accurate results. Accents that are outside of this group often perform poorly, making the user experience very frustrating for those users. It is important to carefully review any AI system for this type of unintentional exclusion or negative impact.

Future developments of AI for virtual reality applications

In recent years, the term “metaverse” has become increasingly popular. For many people, the metaverse is defined by sci-fi movies like “Ready, Player One”, where users can use immersive technology to enter an almost unlimited virtual world filled with new and novel experiences. Even with the latest VR technology, AR technology and immersive technology in general, we are still a long way from the metaverse being a reality. But it is also true that digital transformation is accelerating, AI applications are expanding, and immersive technology as a whole is developing rapidly.

Companies from Google, to Meta (formerly known as Facebook), to Microsoft, Nvidia, countless startups and many others are all driving innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality and related technologies. While we’ve come a long way since the early days of the VR headset and the simplest ai algorithm, there is still much work to be done. The future of immersive technology, artificial intelligence and intelligent reality looks bright indeed.

Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence

Undoubtedly, one of the main features of the emerging metaverse is the massive and more complex data that will be generated, providing opportunities for further development of AI, which can read and parse large amounts of data at a breakneck pace. Users can use AI to make decisions (as most enterprise applications do), or they can combine AI with automation. And it is only a matter of time before AI is used to create more intelligent, more immersive worlds in augmented and virtual reality. The metaverse will combine virtual reality (AR or VR) technology, digital twins, and AI to create virtual worlds that are scalable and closer to the real world.

By combining AR/VR and other technologies to optimize the virtual experience, participants can get a stronger sense of immersion in the virtual world. And the robust deep learning algorithm of AI can free people from repetitive work when building a metaverse and automatically extend the boundaries of the metaverse world.

Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Twin

The digital twin enables the metaverse and the real world to interact. Changes in either one of them will lead to corresponding changes in the other world. 

A digital twin is a digital clone of a physical entity or system with high integrity and the ability to interact with the physical world in real-time. Achieving all the functions of a digital twin for the physical world requires a large amount of reading, processing,andanalyzing data,inwhichhumanoperations areundoubtedly inefficient. Therefore, it is necessary to automate this process. Deep learning of artificial intelligence technology can train machines to automatically extract valid information from large amounts of complex data and analyze it. Thus, deep understanding has excellent potential to facilitate the implementation of digital twins. A study has proposed a generic deep learning algorithm that can be applied to the digital twin. In the training phase, historical data from the metaverse and the physical world are fused for deep learning training and testing. If the test results meet the requirements, an automated system is implemented. In the implementation phase, real-time data from the metaverse and the physical world are fused for model inference.

Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Twin

The evolution of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has blurred the distinction between drivers and passengers, resulting in increased demand for in-car entertainment. Simultaneously, social networking platforms are evolving to adopt AR (Augmented Reality)/VR (Virtual Reality)-centric metaverses. Self-driving cars will free up the drivers and passengers to engage in leisure activities such as watching VR videos and playing games while travelling. Before driverless cars can become a “third living space”, open challenges confront the provision of immersive content (e.g., VR videos and gaming) with a high level of Quality of Experience (QoE). Current autonomous vehicular network technologies focus on navigation and safety and rely on ubiquitous high-speed 5G/6G network connectivity to provide a seamless streaming experience in AVs

The metaverse can be defined as a captivating virtual world where users come together to share experiences and engage in real-time interactions within simulated environments. It encompasses a wide range technologies, including VR, AR, eXtended Reality (XR), digital twins, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this immersive digital environment, users can explore and connect with others, blurring the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds. The term Moving Metaverse refers to the immersive metaverse-like experience within vehicles, which appears to be an appealing future direction for inter- and intravehicular interaction. In such an environment, the users or passengers perceive an immersive digital experience when travelling in future autonomous vehicles. In the Moving Metaverse, the passengers will experience and engage with AR and VR content, with numerous entertainment and communication opportunities within the vehicle while interacting with intelligent systems. The Moving Metaverse combines the physical movement of the vehicle with the immersive capabilities of a virtual environment to create a unique and interactive media consumption experience for passengers during their journey.

Main technologies involved in the Metaverse

Based on the key technologies involved in the metaverse, it is divided its industry chain into seven levels. The development of the metaverse academic field can be seen from the progress of some key technologies involved.

• The infrastructure layer includes communication technology and chip technology. The communication technology mainly involves various communication technologies such as 5G.

• The human-computer interaction layer mainly involves multi-dimensional interactions such as mobile devices, smart glasses, wearable devices, haptics, gestures, voice recognition systems, brain-computer interfaces, etc., full-body tracking and full-body sensing. Human-computer interaction equipment is the entrance to the metaverse world, responsible for providing a completely real, lasting and smooth interactive experience, and is a bridge between the metaverse and the real world. The decentralized layer includes cloud computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence, digital twin, blockchain, etc. Cloud computing mainly provides high-standard computing power support for the realization of the Metaverse, which supports simultaneous online and virtualized operations of a large number of users, and also enables 3D graphics to be rendered on the cloud GPU, releasing the pressure on front-end equipment. While edge computing provides computing power support, it ensures low latency. Artificial intelligence mainly brings continuous vitality to the Metaverse, and its related technical reserves such as identification, recommendation, creation, and search can be directly applied to all levels of the Metaverse, thereby accelerating the massive data processing, analysis and mining tasks it needs. The digital twin virtualizes the real world, and its applications are mainly focused on industry applications. The metaverse is not only a simulation of the real world, but can also create elements that are not in the real world, and its application is mainly personal. The blockchain mainly ensures that the virtual assets of the Metaverse are not restricted by centralized institutions, thereby effectively guaranteeing the ownership of digital assets and making its economic system a stable, efficient, transparent, and decentralized independent system.

• The spatial computing layer includes 3D engine, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), geographic information mapping, etc.

• The creator economy layer includes design tools, capital markets, workflow, business, etc.

• The discovery layer includes ad networks, social, content distribution, rating systems, app stores, intermediary systems, and more.

• The experience layer includes gaming, social, eSports, theater, shopping, and more.

Milestones in virtual reality (VR), the metaverse, and entertainment

Films, novels, and games have not only provided ideas and inspiration for virtual worlds; the invention of enabling devices and technology as well as advances in computing were often driven by innovations in movies and computer gaming.

• During 1896–1912, Georges Méliès, a stage magician, actor, and producer, began creating fantasy motion pictures that were intended to be both surreal and immersive. Many were based on the science fiction writings of Jules Verne.

• By the 1920s, special effects techniques had improved enough to make movies seem even more realistic, bringing to the big screen new fantasy worlds that bordered on immersive. For example, director Fritz Lang’s expressionist Metropolis (1927) portrayed a dystopian futuristic society that resembled some modern computer game settings and introduced new technologies, such as robots, to the public.

• Eventually, more immersive, 3D movies were attempted, such as the now-lost silent drama Power of Love (1922), which used the familiar red–green glasses/film stock technology. The film allowed the viewer to select either a happy or sad ending by looking through either the red or green lens. However, this film was shown only once, and it was not until the 1950s that 3D movies, using red–green glasses, became relatively commonplace.

In a detour from entertainment, it is important to note the contributions of simulation technology that would eventually advance the metaverse as well.

• The first simple mechanical flight simulators appeared in the late 1920s, evolving into complex electromechanical ones that were used to train pilots during World War II. 

• By the 1950s, heads-up displays—with avionics information superimposed on the real outside view—were developed for use in both simulators and aircraft. At the same time, advanced navigation systems technologies, such as mechanical and later piezoelectric gyroscopes and accelerometers, were perfected and reduced in size, making them suitable for later gaming devices.

In 1962, cinematographer Morton Heilig began experimenting with technologies that would allow moviegoers to feel like they were in the movie. His experiments led to the invention of an arcade-like ride, the Sensorama motorcycle simulator. The device simulated a motorcycle ride through the streets of New York using a stereoscopic color

display, stereo sounds, and odor and vibration actuators.

By 1965, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland had invented “the ultimate display,” a head-mounted device that provided stereoscopic vision. The device is now commonplace in simulation and VR. Although not yet fully immersive, new cinematographic technologies were improving the realism of certain movies, and interactivity was introduced.

New immersive sound technology appeared soon after. Sensurround, which was developed specifically for the film Earthquake (1974), was an advanced sound system

with an extended bass range. With this technology, tremors and aftershocks could actually be felt in the theater, lending a frightening realism.

In 1982, the groundbreaking movie Tron introduced the concept of virtual worlds and total immersion in those worlds. Along the way, Disney Studios pioneered new computer graphics techniques that would be used in other movies and in computer games. While the movie largely takes place in cyberspace, it was not until the novel Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson that the term cyberspace was defined and elaborated.

Throughout the 1980s, the home computer gaming industry was booming as more affordable microcomputers appeared. By the mid-1990s, affordable VR goggles and gloves were developed by scientists, notably Jaron Lanier, and soon became available for use in early VR computer games. In the 1985 award-winning novel Ender’s Game, the titular protagonist and his classmates use these technologies in computer battle simulations. Unbeknown to them, they are really virtually controlling spaceships

and battling an existential threat of invasion.

During the 1990s, researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago developed the room-scale Cave Virtual Environment VR system (whose name was actually a witty pun on Plato’s cave allegory). Here, stereoscopic images are projected onto the walls of a room, providing a sense of partial immersion. This technology has been deployed for museums, preconstruction building walkthroughs, and other simulations.

Meanwhile, advances in realistic 3D and VR gaming continued, culminating in the multiplayer Second Life environment, launched in 2003 by Linden Labs. Second Life established not only realistic virtual work, play, and explore environments with customizable avatars but also introduced a monetary exchange system in this metaverse through its Linden dollars.

The openness of Second Life and its breakthrough idea of a virtual economic exchange system allowed third parties to develop and monetize enhancements to the avatars’ abilities for all kinds of behaviors, including obtaining superpowers and indulging sexual fantasies. Tracking these developments, the movie Avatar (2009) featured organic humanoid robots that are virtually controlled by genetically matched humans.

In the 2010s, computer science advancements led to the development of the first consumer-grade VR headmounted displays or headsets. Today, consumer-grade wireless, stand-alone VR headsets are widely available. These devices appear prominently in the fictional massively multiuser online VR game OASIS, described in the 2011 science fiction novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and subsequent movie (2018).

Perhaps signaling that the metaverse already exists, in October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta and its mission, accordingly, by announcing its plans to focus on building the metaverse. Recognizing the need for continued openness and standards for the metaverse, in 2021, IEEE committed to help set standards to define the operating principles of virtual worlds.

Metaverse and new narrative

Recent technological advancements have facilitated several innovations and changes in the communication industry as well as other fields. Rapid developments in digital technologies reveal significant effects and results in this change and transformation. The effects of digital transformation, which can be observed in all areas, continue to create changes in a wide range, from daily life practices to communication channels and environments. Digital transformation has also caused significant changes in the interaction of the masses with communication tools and environments. 

The era of analog mass media, dominated by a one-way communication process, has been digitally transformed by converged media. This current media occupies much more space in people’s daily life practices, thanks to the advancements in telecommunication technologies.

Film practices in the Metaverse

Technologies such as immersive VR and AR devices, motion capture sensors and volumetric video, photogrammetry, algorithms, big data, AI and machine learning, together with game engines and the increasing maturity and affordability of 5G technologies and graphics cards, will give rise to new artistic paradigms that will contribute to the development of the metaverse.

Video game design

Considering the ways in which video games and interactive 3D spaces cater to human learning via rules and affordances, it is useful to explore the engaging features of video game design that exist separately from the entertaining elements. Prioritizing objectives will be required if the metaverse is to have a substantial social influence that extends beyond the last era of social media . Given the current limits of computer hardware, internet latency, and even pedagogical content, education is likely to be a key topic in terms of accessibility. As such, the current focus of the metaverse is on breadth rather than depth, as seen in its graphical fidelity and, primarily, commercial manifestations. These experiences, as with many video games and interactive 3D spaces, are primarily didactic in nature, affording participants very little in terms of autonomous freedom. This is clear in advertisements and campaigns that focus on company intention rather than user attention.

Film production education

The concept of a film school in the metaverse may seem controversial to some; however, it has already occurred in various forms for some time.

A brave new world

There are different schools of thought about the Metaverse and what makes it the Metaverse. There are some people who believe the Metaverse needs to be social in nature, and that it would not exist without interaction from multiple people. There are others who believe that the Metaverse needs to have some kind of transactional commerce base behind it, such as blockchain, crypto or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

We also need to understand that there are technologies that support the Metaverse and are foundational to its purpose, such as immersive worlds and the potential for connection to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, and these can have an incredibly positive impact on the value chain of any company anywhere in the world. In fact, there are a multitude of enterprise use cases for the Metaverse already, many of which do not focus on business-to- consumer interactions and instead are centred on operational efficiency and productivity.

Metaverse trends in 2023

During 2022 it was hard to move without bumping into the term "metaverse."  While Meta focuses on creating virtual reality environments, companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are developing metaverse environments for collaborating and working on digital projects. 

Metaverse as a new marketing channel.  As with search engines and social media (the technological enablers of web 1.0 and 2.0), marketing and advertising will provide the fuel that will boost web 3.0 - the metaverse - into the mainstream. The metaverse, with its focus on customer experience and one-to-one connections, is another channel of communication.

Corporate metaverse.  The metaverse promises to provide platforms, tools, and entire virtual worlds where business can be done remotely, efficiently, and intelligently.  We can expect to see the metaverse concept merge with the idea of the “digital twin” – virtual simulations of real-world products, processes, or operations that can be used to test and prototype new ideas in the safe environment of the digital domain.  Another use of metaverse technology in the corporate world will be conducting training, onboarding, and other tasks. 

Web3 and decentralization.  According to the proponents of web3, distributed ledgers and blockchain technology will give rise to a new internet outside of the control of global corporations, which will no longer hold the power to censor opinions they don’t agree with or pull the plug if they want to take someone offline entirely. This vision is built around decentralized metaverse platforms such as The Sandbox and Decentraland, which will eventually be organized as DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)s. Buying ownership rights will give individuals a say in the way that the organization building the virtual domain is run, which will eventually lead to the establishment of virtual democracies and user-owned communities. NFTs are another aspect of the decentralized metaverse. These are unique tokens that live on blockchains – just like non-unique tokens such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin do – and can be used to represent unique online goods or commodities.  

Virtual and augmented reality.  The idea of immersive, experiential technology is central to the metaverse – whatever it ends up looking like, it will be more engaging than the digital worlds we are used to today (such as Facebook or the World Wide Web). Therefore, many ideas of how we will interact with it involve immersive technology such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed/extender reality (MR/XR). Meta has built its specific vision of what the “next level” of the internet will look like around virtual reality, and 2023 will bring new versions of its hugely popular Quest VR headsets, as well as new VR/AR/MR headsets. Beyond headsets, we can expect to see new developments in full-body haptic suits, which are already used by organizations like NASA and SpaceX for simulating extreme environments but will also be used to create consumer metaverse experiences that are even more realistic and immersive. 

More advanced avatar technology.  Many ideas of what the metaverse will involve us adopting avatars that represent us in the digital world. Just as we are used to playing characters in video games or expressing our persona in social media, the avatar is the presence that we project as we engage and interact with other users – they might look like us, or like cartoon characters, or like something completely fantastic that could never exist in the real world! Meta originally offered only very basic cartoon-like avatars – which were widely ridiculed – but more recently has developed almost photorealistic technology that will allow us to look almost exactly like we do in the real world. In 2023, I predict that we will see more advanced use cases for technology such as motion capture, which will mean that as well as looking and sounding more like us, our avatars will adopt our own unique gestures and body language. We may even start to see further developments in the fields of autonomous avatars – meaning they won't be under our direct control but will be enabled by AI to act as our representatives in the digital world while we ourselves get on with other, completely unrelated tasks.

PREFACE TO THE METAVERSE 2022

Meta is a magic word that inspires infinite imaginations of countless people from various professions and backgrounds. It is also an ancient Greek word that means "beyond" in a self-referring sense, e.g., a meta-conversation is a conversation about conversations, and metadata is data about data (e.g., the header informationin a photo that tells us when and where it wastaken). Thus, the metaverse is a universe of universes, i.e., the ultimate universe, and metavisionis the vision of vision, e.g., the sensing of senses, and thus the ultimate sensory experience-extended reality and extended intelligence.

The metaverse will have a profound impact on our daily work, play, and life, across all industries and sectors, and on the economy and deconomy (inverse economy), reshaping society for all human kind.

MULTIPLE METAVERSES: Consumer, idustrial and enterprise metaverse

The metaverse will not just be about exploring a simulated virtual world, but also an experience that fuses physical and digital realities, enabling  users to create or manipulate representations of real-world objects, systems and processes in the digital world. This is made possible with detailed digital twins, which allow users to test and predict outcomes in the digital world before it happens in physical reality.

Retrospectively, what most people know and understand about the ‘metaverse’, is the consumer metaverse. This metaverse provides an immersive experience for users to fully dive into their entertainment of choice, whether it be music, movies or games. It can also be used as an extension of users’ social interactions in the same space, and it amplifies physical experiences like shopping, travelling and live events.

There are other metaverses that we imagine would be commonplace in the future – the industrial metaverse and the enterprise metaverse. While they are all different, they share some common technology build-up, namely user interactions with the metaverse through XR (extended reality). This form of XR allows users to explore the world on the go, and not just confined to being at home or work.

• The industrial metaverse has immense growth potential. While still in its formative stages, it is already revolutionizing the way operations function through the usage of the digital twin. Vehicle manufacturers can build engines or vehicle designs to simulate how the vehicle can move in real life, and ports can use digital twins to track every container on their docks. This metaverse allows for visualization of operations while also keeping costs down, increasing productivity, safety and flexibility.

• Meanwhile, the enterprise metaverse will have core productivity applications that could make businesses function smoothly, especially as corporations are moving towards a hybrid working model following the COVID-19 pandemic. Design-centric businesses like architecture or engineering can utilize the enterprise metaverse to create designs in the digital world before translating them into real-time projects. Corporate employees may tune into company meetings or trainings through VR (virtual reality) designed meeting spots within the metaverse, from wherever they are, enhancing the way employees can collaborate.

A parallel digital universe

The metaverse is a virtual digital world where interconnected platforms replicate and improve real life experiences or create new digital and hybrid services. 

So far, the Metaverse refers to the customer experience elements only! The idea of the Metaverse is still based on a similar concept of the World Wide Web – it should be a global interactive platform. where interoperable worlds are connected. Currently there are many meta-islands, or meta walled-gardens, smaller communities where you can build a service. The global standard for interconnections is missing.

So, is the future already here? No.

These might not replace the web as we know it, but they will complement and expand it.

The Internet of Senses

Today, technology interacts primarily with two senses – sight and sound. Our vision is that advanced technology will enable a full internet of senses by 2025, and include the ability to digitally communicate thoughts by 2030. We live in a screen-based 4G world where smartphones are integral to our lives, but people aren’t expecting this to be the case for much longer. Half the world’s smartphone users predict that by 2025 we will all be wearing lightweight, fashionable AR glasses. Consumers also predict wearables that can instantly translate languages, allow us to control our sound environment and experience smell, taste, textures and temperature digitally. As consumers step further into this sensory digital world, they will require hyper-fast connectivity, imperceptible edge computingbased lag and advanced automation.

Trend 1: Your brain is the user interface

Trend 2: Sounds like me

Trend 3: Any flavor you want

Trend 4: Digital aroma

Trend 5: Total touch

Trend 6: Merged reality

Trend 7: Verified as real

Trend 8: Post-privacy consumers

Trend 9: Connected sustainability

Trend 10: Sensational services

The various “trends” are clustered under the name of Internet of Senses proposing the idea of a full sensory immersion in the cyberspace, made possible by the low latency – high bandwidth possible with 5G. Interestingly, the low latency is indeed a crucial factor when we want to create tactile sensations: our touch responds to vibration that are sensitive to changes over one millisecond. 

The first prediction is that our brain will be the “User Interface” without our sensory system mediation, closing the gap between thinking and doing. Mind reading would become a possibility, at least this is what people interviewed by the Ericsson research team feel will be possible in ten years time. The report does not actually mention BCI, Brain Computer Interfaces, so it is not clear what technology might support this claim (I repeat, the claim is the result of lay people interviews, not a prediction coming from science). It seems far fetched, and it is not going to happen in this decade, and most likely in this century (I know, never say never). What is evident, however, is that if such a possibility would become real the amount of issues to be faced will be huge: how could you avoid other people reading your thoughts? 

Speaking in one language and hearing that voice in a different one through language translating earbuds seems much more feasible and may become “normal” by the end of this decade, however the report goes a bit further expecting some sort of bands, bandanas, directly communicating with your brain. Apart from people that have hearing impairment I do not see the need to skip the ears to communicate directly (assuming this will become possible) with the brain.

Our taste is strongly intertwined with our smell (when you have a cold food tastes differently, much less tasty!) and smell is a sense you cannot recreate in your brain at conscious level (try to feel a taste by thinking at it and you cannot do it, whilst you can close your eyes and “see” a face). The reason is that the other senses are perceived at the cortical level of the brain where we have a control, smell is processed deep inside the brain.

Quality of Experience in the Metaverse

The Metaverse provides a novel experience to the user, by opening the doors to social-based multiuser environments merging physical reality with digital virtuality. 

The Metaverse is defined as the post-reality universe, a perpetual and persistent multiuser environment merging physical reality with digital virtuality. It is based on the convergence of technologies that enable multisensory interactions with virtual environments, digital objects and people, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). There are different types of Metaverse, however, all Metaverse have in common one element, i.e., providing a virtual world where people can interact with the digital environment and other users in realtime. Nonetheless, with respect to AR and VR, the Metaverse has a strong aspect as a service with more sustainable content and social meaning. Therefore, the social dimension has a crucial role for the Metaverse applications. Not all Metaverse are based on immersive technologies. Also, there are additional aspects that may impact on the user’s QoE, such as economic factors, engagement, and social involvement, which are of particular relevance for Metaverse applications.

• The social dimension of the Metaverse is very important, and it is a unique characteristic that is not provided by other multimedia-based applications. Metaverse has a strong aspect as a service with more sustainable content and social meaning. Also, it is stated that the Metaverse has a scalable environment that can accommodate many people, which is essential to reinforce social meaning. The social dimension in the Metaverse is a different concept as it regards sharing a digital place where people can interact or stay closer like the real world. 

• The economic aspect considered for traditional multimedia applications mainly regards the price (tariff) paid to utilize the service. Instead, with the economic dimension of the Metaverse we identify the possibility to buy  digital properties in the Metaverse, such as lands (virtual spaces), NFT (non-fungible token), or virtual accessories for the avatar with specific digital wallets and crypto-currency. The economic dimension also includes the possibility for the user to find a job in the Metaverse and to earn money as well (crypto-currency in this case). User profiling may be useful also for the economic aspects, such as to find an employment that requires the user’s skills or to suggest events affordable for the user’s financial means.

Flavor perception: pairing digital taste, smell, and color sensations

Recently, there has been an active growth in interest towards researching the simulation of taste sensations in interactive systems. These observations and phenomena underline the importance of multiple sensory modalities in flavor perception, in particular, the influuences of color, taste, and smell modalities. 

Vocktail (a.k.a. Virtual Cocktail) is an interactive drinking utensil that digitally simulates multisensory flavor experiences. Thee Vocktail system utilizes three common sensory modalities, taste, smell, and visual (color), to create virtual flavors and augment the existing flavors of a beverage. The system is coupled with a mobile application that enables users to create customized virtual flavor sensations by configuring each of the stimuli via Bluetooth. System consists of a cocktail glass that is seamlessly fused into a 3D printed structure, which holds the electronic control module, three scent cartridges, and three micro air-pumps. When a user drinks from the system, the visual (RGB light projected on the beverage), taste (electrical stimulation at the tip of the tongue), and smell stimuli (emited by micro air-pumps) are combined to create a virtual flavor sensation, thus altering the flavor of the beverage. Results suggest

that the combination of these stimuli delivers richer flavor experiences, as compared to separately simulating individual modalities, and indicates that the types of pairings that can be formed between smell and electric taste stimuli.

The proposed method of Vocktail utilizes three concepts to simulate flavors. The simultaneous perception of these stimuli creates augmented flavor sensations.

• Color projected on beverage: upon seeing a glass of beverage we form a pre-taste perception in our mind based on the beverage’s color, fizziness, temperature, and other physical attributes

• Overlaying smell sensations: smells have a key role when perceiving and enjoying flavors

• Digital taste simulation: controlled electrical pulses on the tip of the tongue to simulate saltiness, sourness, and bitterness while drinking the beverage.

In our everyday life, we are accustomed to taste-smell pairs through our food experiences, explaining why we call some smells ‘sweet’ and others ‘sour’. 

Digital version of oneself

Another Me is person’s alter ego that appears to have the same intelligence and personality as an actual human and is recognized and active in society as that person.

Another Me is able to participate actively as oneself in a way that transcends the limitations of the real world and share the results of such activities as experiences of oneself. There are three key technical issues surrounding this challenge: the ability to think and act autonomously as a human, the ability to have a personality like the represented person, and the ability to give feedback on the experiences obtained by Another Me. 

The main technologies for addressing these issues: question-generation technology, body-motion-generation technology, and dialogue-video-summarization technology. 

• To get Another Me to act autonomously, the digital twin must be able to make decisions about its next action. A means of collecting information as decision-making material is essential for this to be possible. 

• To obtain the feeling that Another Me has the same personality as an actual person, its appearance is, of course, important, but making voice, way of speaking, and body motion like that person is also important. To date, we have clarified that differences in body motion, such as facial expressions, face and eye movements, body language, and hand gestures, can be felt as differences in personality traits  and that those differences can be a significant clue to distinguishing individuals. 

• The aim is to achieve a society in which humans and Another Me can grow together. It will not be sufficient to simply use Another Me as a surrogate for oneself—it will also be necessary to efficiently feed the experiences obtained by Another Me back to oneself. It will also be necessary to convey not only the content of what Another Me does but also the emotions likely to be felt at that time and at that place so that the represented person can treat what Another Me does as one’s actions. Dialogue-video-summarization technology summarizes recorded dialogue over a length of time shorter than the actual meeting and generates video not only of the content of that dialogue but also of the atmosphere of the place where the dialogue occurred.

Digital twin computing

A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity. 

Virtual representation is a set of correlated digital models and supporting data (e.g. metadata, master data, reference data, etc.), which provide cohesive information about their subject matter. 

We divided digital models into two categories:

• A representational model which consists of structured information which generally represents the states of entities or processes.

• A computational simulation model which is an executable model of a process and consists of data and algorithms that input and output representational models.

Digital models can be 3D meshes, 3D CAD Models, mathematical equations, databases, physics-based, AI-based, and even Excel spreadsheets. All these things can serve as digital representations or computational simulations related to the historical, present, and potential future states of real-world entities and processes – the subject matter of a digital twin.

A digital twin is an accurate cyberspace representation of the shape, state and function of a real-world object such as a production machine in a factory, aircraft engine or automobile. Digital twins enable analysis of current states, future predictions and simulations of possibilities of objects in cyberspace. Until now, the digital twin framework has entailed mapping real-world objects into cyberspace to perform analysis and predictions, with the results of those analyses and predictions used after reverse mapping them back into the real world.

The concept of digital twin computing (DTC) we are aiming for is a significant advancement on the existing concept of digital twins. Through digital twin operations, DCT aims to create simulations in cyberspace that will surpass the reproductions of the real world, and that could even have conditions that are different from the real world, and then use them in the real space.

Mobile metaverse and digital twinning

Improving the interactivity and interconnectivity between people is one of the highlights of the Metaverse. The Metaverse relies on a core approach, digital twinning, which is a means to replicate physical world objects, people, actions and scenes onto the virtual world. Being able to access scenes and information associated with the physical world, in the Metaverse in real-time and under mobility, is essential in developing a highly accessible, interactive and interconnective experience for all users. This development allows users from other locations to access high-quality real-world and up-to-date information about events happening in another location, and socialize with others hyperinteractively. Nevertheless, receiving continual, smooth updates generated by others from the Metaverse is a challenging task due to the large data size of the virtual world graphics and the need for low latency transmission.With the development of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), users can interact via the Metaverse in a highly interactive manner, even under mobility.

Meteverse taxonomy and networking requirements

We present here four possible definitions. We do not settle on one specific definition, as it is not our scope to offer a definitive definition of the metaverse, or to settle any debate about what is/what isn’t a metaverse. Rather we see in the different definitions a different set of implications for the design of the application.

• Definition 1: “a 3D virtual shared world where all activities can be carried out with the help of augmented and virtual reality services.”

• Definition 2: “an integrated immersive ecosystem where the barriers between the virtual and real worlds are seamless to users, allowing the use of avatars and holograms to work, interact and socialize with simulated shared experience.”

• Definition 3: “the next generation Internet that is always real‑time and mostly 3D, mostly interactive, mostly social and mostly persistent.” 

Note that the first definition is an extension of an AR/VR framework; the second definition includes an ecosystem, which assumes a set of APIs to integrate multiple elements into the ecosystem. The last definition views the metaverse as the replacement of the Internet, that is a global scale application that supports an unlimited range of applications and functions, with a requirement of persistence. As we will discuss the ITU‑T effort below, we note that ITU‑T has provided its own preliminary definition for further discussion and harmonization with other SDOs:

• Definition 4: “The Metaverse is an integrative and unified ecosystem of virtual worlds, which is based on inter‑operable Internet‑based and enhanced reality systems, and offers immersive experience to individuals during their digital and synchronize interactions, and new value generation opportunities to organizations.”

As with the definition of the metaverse, we can try to better define what a metaverse is by way of a taxonomy that differentiates according to different criteria. The dimensions that we consider are listed below. 

Environment. The environment can be realistic, unrealistic, fused; the more realistic (or detailed) the more bandwidth is required. Conversely, some unrealistic environments can be generated and rendered from some basic models that can be distributed ahead of time. The environment can also be generated anew every time, or have some permanence. In the latter case, it can be cached at the edge or on the device.

Interface. The environment can be interacted through an interface that ranges from a simple phone screen to a 3D Head‑Mounted Display (HMD), from a window into the virtual world into an immersive experience; other physical methods to interface the virtual environment (such as haptics) can be included as well.

Interaction. The level of interaction can be specifiic to the virtual environment. It can be in one extreme a solitary experience (such as playing games against a computer) and extends to social networking, and/or work collaboration. The granularity of the interaction also impacts the infrastructure requirements.

Security. It is paramount to protect the security and privacy of the experience. This includes data security, privacy, software/hardware/network security. Further, the granularity of the security may include several layers, as for instance, only a given set of participants can access a given shared metaverse; and within this metaverse, only a subset can have access to objects or rooms within.

Centralization. This is not a characteristic of the metaverse itself, rather a design choice on how to deploy such an application over an infrastructure. However, this choice has an impact on the infrastructure and needs to be considered. Centralization of the metaverse, by hosting it on a specific set of servers and having clients connect to these

servers, facilitates some aspects of the metaverse; for instance, it requires N connections, where N is the number of users; and it facilitates access controls, as per the ”security” item above.

Metaverse standardization discussions had initiated in several ITU‑T Study Groups (SGs), including SG16, SG17, and SG20, and other SGs had also shown an interest in the metaverse. In particular, ITU‑T SG16 (Multimedia and related digital technologies) established a correspondence group on metaverse (CG-Metaverse) in January 2022 to discuss metaverse standardization issues. The CG‑Metaverse also discussed the need to establish an ITU‑T Focus Group on Metaverse (FG‑MV). Finally, the ITU‑T FG‑MV was established under the ITU‑T Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG) in December 2022, as the scope of metaverse standardization is not limited to a specific working group.

Virtuelni svet i metaverzum platforme

Digitalni svet računarskih igara RPG (role playing game) u kojem uživo učestvujemo (Fortnite, Rolblox, Minecracft)  istovremeno s drugim igračima, predstavlja svojevrsni metaverzum. Razvojem tehnologije pojavljuju se i mali virtuelni svetovi (SecondLife, Decentraland). 

Metaverzum o kojem se govori u ovom trenutku, a razvijaće se sledećih 10 godina,  obuhvata sve aspekte našeg života i rada, poslovne aktivnosti, obrazovanje, kulturu, politiku, trgovinu. Kao sledeća generacija Interneta, metaverzum menja i način posmatranja sveta i način kako učestvujemo u njemu. Zasniva se na VR/AR i digitalnoj infrastrukturi koja omogućava komunikaciju na svim nivoima, ali istovremeno i interakciju digitalnog sveta sa stvarnim, fizičkim. Digitalna komunikacija se ostvaruje aplikacijama za pametne telefone i VR/AR naočarima/slušalicama. I nova generacija mobilnih mreža 5G je značajna komponenta za kreiranje metaverzuma. 

Meta Platforms Inc kreirala je virtuelni svet Horizon 2019. godine kao platformu za kreiranje VR igara. Daljim razvojem platforme, pokrenut je virtuelni svet Horizon Worlds 2021. godine sa integrisanim alatima za kreiranje sopstvenog digitalnog okruženja i povezivanjem sa drugim digitalnim svetovima. Meta je lansirala i VR konferencijski softver Horizon Workrooms i Horizon Venues za posetioce virtuelnih koncerata. Kreiranjem virtuelnog kancelarijskog prostora, možemo raditi od kuće, okupljati se uživo i sedeti zajedno za istim stolom kao na pravom sastanku u realnom životu. Na isti način kreiraju se i virtuelni domovi za druženje sa prijateljima, prisustvuje koncertima i predstavama, putuje u daleke zemlje, kupuje virtuelna odeća i drugi predmeti. Horizon Personal Space je izolovani lični prostor gde ste prilagođavali svoj avatar i gledali ažuriranja i događaje u Horizon Worlds, što ga čini u suštini prvim mestom na koje biste otišli ​​pre nego što uskočite u sve veći broj društvenih VR soba i događaja uživo koji se nude kroz Horizon Worlds. Međutim, to je bilo lično, samo vi ste mu mogli pristupiti. Međutim, Meta je predstavila novi lični prostor koji vam omogućava da se družite sa prijateljima i igrate mini-igre, čineći to područje kao stan za opuštanje pre nego što odete na druga virtuelna mesta na platformi.

Microsoft je nadogradio svoju AR platformu Mesh za virtuelno predstavljanje radnih mesta, kao i prostora za održavanje sastanaka. Podržani su 3D avatari i impresivni digitalni radni prostori. MS Loop omogućava udaljenim radnicima da se jednostavno kreću, sinhronizuju i dele dokumente i resurse. Microsoft Mesh je nova usluga zasnovana na Azure koja je prvi put najavljena u martu 2021. Omogućava udaljenim i hibridnim timovima da komuniciraju i dele sadržaj jedni sa drugima na sastanku timova ili u virtuelnom prostoru koji impresivan. Može se pristupiti preko računara ili slušalica virtuelne realnosti (VR). Microsoft Mesh omogućava kolegama da komuniciraju kontaktom očima, izrazima lica i fizičkim gestovima.

Konkurentska trka vodećih svetskih kompanija (Google, Apple, Sony, Roblox, Epic) za dominaciju u digitalnom životu je sve izraženija.

Social virtual reality spaces and storyliving in residential communities

Meta has released in Dec. 2021  its social virtual reality space, Horizon Worlds toward building the metaverse of connected digital worlds. The app lets users build their own mini-games and activities on top of Meta's base game with best-in-class social world-building tools. The creation tools are built directly into the virtual reality game, so players can access them directly without any extra steps.

The first Storyliving by Disney community currently exploring locations Rancho Mirage, CA in  spectacular creative oasis of the Greater Palm Springs area.   Disney is not the developer of residential comunity, third-parties developing and building are independently owned and operated. Club Membership, programming, and access and use of future proposed amenities and offerings, will require payment of dues and/or fees and be subject to additional terms and conditions, which will be set by the owner of the club. Availability of club membership and operation of club facilities are not guaranteed.

Metaverse user experience

We’ve identified five attributes of a metaverse user experience, which are heavily influenced by the device, application, platform and/or connectivity. You could think of each of these as existing on a sliding scale, from a basic to a full metaverse experience.

Persistence.  This relates to the metaverse’s ability to remember a user and their environment from one session to the next, and is strongly determined by the nature of the metaverse platform. A basic platform doesn’t store any information about the user, so they start afresh each time. At the other end of the scale, the in-world version of the user, with all of its attributes and relationships, is fully persistent.

Openness: This is also determined by the platform, and relates to the extent to which the metaverse is accessible to different providers – whether of technology, content, or services. At its most basic, the metaverse is a centralized, walled garden environment delivered by just one provider. At its fullest, a user can transfer any asset (such as their avatar, NFTs, skin or tokens) easily between different platforms, with no central or intermediate authority restricting asset transfer.

Immersivity.  This is about the degree of digital-physical fusion offered by the metaverse experience. A basic experience might be something like a car’s navigation overlay, which barely alters the real world the driver is seeing and operating in. At the other end of the scale, a VR headset worn with a bodysuit might fully immerse the user’s body into a digital environment where hyper-realistic virtual assets are experienced through multiple senses, just like real-world objects. This attribute is influenced by a combination of device, platform, and connectivity.

Mobility.  This is the extent to which the user can move around in the real world while using the metaverse. At the basic end of the scale, the user has to sit or stand in one spot, as is the case with most VR-based experiences today. At the top end, they can move around freely, both inside and outside. Technologically, this will be determined by devices and connectivity, but there may also be legal blockers. It may never be deemed safe to enter a fully immersive metaverse outside of legally-prescribed spaces, for example.

Interactivity.  This last attribute is the ability to interact, collaborate or socialize with other users and things in the metaverse. This will be determined mostly by the device and platform, but to a lesser extent also the connectivity. In a basic metaverse experience the user has no option to connect or interact with others, while the richest experiences offer unlimited interaction between participants using multiple senses.

All five of these factors will evolve at different rates, encountering barriers and enablers along the way. The ultra-low latency required for some AR use cases, for example, won’t be achievable with mobile networks until the rollout of 5G-Advanced, in or after 2025. There will also be regulatory roadblocks as we grapple with issues of data privacy and online safety, among other areas.

Meta-univerzum se ubrzano proširuje

Metaverzum je računarski koncept koji obuhvata Internet i VR tehnologiju virtuelne stvarnosti i ideju da korisnici formiraju društvene prostore, sisteme proizvodnje sadržaja virtuelnog sveta i digitalne ekonomije. Metaverzum je mreža 3D virtuelnih svetova fokusiran na društvene konekcije. Nakon što je koncept postao popularan više od pola godine, kakvi su rezultati?

U procesu kontinuirane iteracije razvoja VR uređaja i 5G mobilnih mreža, pristupačne cene su očigledni trendovi. Dostupni su nam i virtuelni sastanci u video-konferencijskim klaud aplikacijama Zoom Immersive Scenes i MS Teams Together mode koje procesiraju video-strimove i kreiraju naše avatare u zajedničkom prostoru za sastanke. Meta je lansirala VR konferencijski softver Horizon Workrooms i Horizon Venues za posetioce virtuelnih koncerata. Meta obećava izgradnju i isporuku prilagođenih virtuelnih prostora koje zaista posedujete i delite sa vašim prijatelja, zajednicom i drugim stanovnicima metaverzuma. Mobilni internet sada povezuje ljude, prostore i objete na dinamičan i naglašen način.

Iako je koncept metaverzuma privukao veliku pažnju i velike kompanije su ušle u igru, vremenska dinamika razvoja je neizvesna. Industrija je u fazi postavljanja temelja za scenarije virtuelnih društvenih prostora i daleko je od postizanja pune pokrivenosti. Uz idealno stanje otvorenosti tehnoloških ekosistema, virtuelne i stvarne interoperabilnosti, velike podatke, digitalne blizance, računarstvo u oblaku, blockchain, postoji nedostatak HW/SW infrastrukture, kao i ekonomski rizici koji se mogu pojaviti u vezi između virtuelne valute i stvarne valute. Postavljaju se izuzetno visoki zahtevi za algoritmima računarske snage, problem uzrokovan snažnom imersijom, i značajni problemi nedostatka jasnih standarda na regulatornom nivou  [D.A.M]

The vision of the metaverse

Considered the next iteration of the internet, the vision of the metaverse is for it to be a social, 3D, virtual universe made up of many interconnected 3D virtual spaces. What we have now - with experience games like Fortnite and Roblox, and collaboration spaces like Spatial and Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms - is a multiverse. Many different platforms with their own infinite landscapes, economies and currencies, and no way to move or operate between them.

The internet was largely developed by public institutions, military labs and independent academics as a way to share research and communicate with other professionals from around the world. Its commercial potential was an afterthought. This is not the case with the metaverse. It is being developed independent of government oversight by big tech companies with commercial intentions at its core. Over the next few decades the metaverse will slowly, continuously emerge and it will inevitably take on many different forms along the way, much like the World Wide Web has.

In the coming years, it will continue to get easier and cheaper for companies to produce high-quality ‘mirror worlds’, known as digital twins, of physical spaces, as well as use scans of the real world to produce high-quality and less-expensive fantasy worlds. Owners of these libraries will have a huge advantage in the XR era. Companies like Nvidia, Facebook, Autodesk, Disney and Snap are all building up their databases, signalling the perceived value of this coming marketplace.

In our day to day lives, the shift into the metaverse will be gradual. Our first entry points will be through familiar apps and sites.  Content on Instagram that we see today could click through to virtual try-ons in virtual worlds, or a group we belong to on Facebook could invite us to join a live chat in 3D. They are also uniquely positioned to generate interoperable personalised avatars for their users based on shared photos, which would effectively eliminate an initial barrier of entry into the metaverse.

Virtuelni društveni prostor HorizonWorlds

Social VR Metaverse aplikacija omogućava korisnicima da istražuju virtuelne svetove na interaktivan i imersivan način, angažujući se u potrošnji i kreiranju sadržaja. Kreatori VR, entuzijasti i korisnici mogu da se okupe kako bi sarađivali i učestvovali u zajedničkim iskustvima, kao i da se pridruže rastućoj virtuelnoj zajednici. Pored VR prostora za navigaciju, postoje spremne komponente za izgradnju VR kao što su blokovi koda, zvukovi i efekti animacije koji pomažu kreatorima sadržaja.

Facebook je prvi put lansirao Horizon Worlds u avgustu 2020. kao beta platformu samo sa pozivom gde su korisnici mogli da upotrebe skup unapred razvijenih alata za kreiranje kako bi razvili iskustva koja žele u VR. Od tada, Horizon paket aplikacija se proširio i obuhvatio druge platforme kao što su Horizon Workrooms za saradnju i Horizon Venues za posetioce koncerata. Horizon Home se pridružuje Horizon Worlds, Workrooms i Venues, Meta omogućava interoperabilnost za postizanje superiornog iskustva za korisnike. Obećava da će izgraditi i isporučiti prilagođeni prostor koji je zaista posedujete, dok ga delite sa vašim prijatelja, zajednicom i stanovnicima Metaverzuma. 

Metaverzum - potraga za imerzijom

Virtualna stvarnost (VR) je generisana verzija vizuelne i audio scene okruženja. Prikazivanje je osmišljeno tako da oponaša vizuelne i audio senzorne podražaje u stvarnom svetu što prirodnije moguće promatraču ili korisniku dok se kreću unutar granica definisanih aplikacijom. VR zahteva slušalice i naočare koje potpuno menjaju korisnikova iskustva u jednom novom simuliranom, imerzivnom i interaktivnom virtuelnom okruženju. Neophodno je praćenje pomeranja glave i pokreta korisnika kako bi se omogućilo ažuriranje simuliranih vizualnih/audio komponenti i osiguralo da sa gledišta korisnika, objekti i izvori zvuka ostaju u skladu sa pokretima korisnika. VR je nova stvarnost!

Naglašena stvarnost (AR) označava simuliranu digitalna sliku projektovanu na snimak stvarnog okruženja, računarska grafika je u interakciji sa objektima u okruženju, pod kontrolom korisnika. AR omogućuje korisniku dodatne informacije ili generisane objekte ili sadržaj koji se preklapa sa njihovim trenutnim okruženjem. Dodatne informacije ili sadržaj su vizuelni i/ili zvučni, a njihovo promatranje u trenutnom okruženju korisnika je direktno, kada ne postoji međudelovanje, obrada i prikaz, ili indirektno kada se njihova percepcija okruženja prenosi putem senzora i može se naglasiti ili procesirati. AR naglašava stvarnost!

Kombinovana stvarnost (MR) označava korisnikov pogled na okruženje sa projektovanom grafikom koja je u interakciji sa stvarnošću (AR), i/ili virtuelno okruženje u koje su inkorporirani elementi stvarnosti (AV). MR je napredni oblik proširene stvarnosti sa virtualnim elementima koji su umetnuti u fizičku scenu sa namerom da omoguće iluziju da su ti elementi komponenta stvarne scene. 

Stvarnost virtuelne realnosti. “Virtual reality seems so real, because reality is so virtual !?”

AR Oblak kao infrastruktura. 3D mapa okruženja u realnom vremenu predstavljaće najznačajniju jedinstvenu softversku infrastrukturu u računarstvu. Neophodno je pozicionirati i vizuelizovati objekte u 3D na način da veći broj korisnika koji upotrebljava različite uređaje posmatra jedan selektovani odsečak svarnog sveta iz različitih uglova u interakciji sa selektovanim objektom u realnom vremenu. Tehnički izazovi su 3D rekonstrukcija visoke rezolucije, segmentacija 3D scene, klasifikacija objekata, striming 3D modela [D.A.M]

Literary origin

The term Metaverse was invented and first appeared in Neal Stevenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash published in 1992. It represented a parallel virtual reality universe created from computer graphics, which users from around the world can access and

connect through goggles and earphones. The backbone of the Metaverse is a protocol called the Street, which links different virtual neighborhoods and locations an analog concept to the information superhighway. Users materialize in the Metaverse in configurable digital bodies called avatars. Although Stevenson’s Metaverse is digital and synthetic, experiences in it can have a real impact on the physical self. A literary precursor to the Metaverse isWilliam Gibson’s VR cyberspace called Matrix in the 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer.

A modern literary reincarnation of the Metaverse is the OASIS, illustrated in the 2011 science fiction novel Ready Player One authored by Ernest Cline. OASIS is a massively multiuser online VR game that evolved into the predominant online destination for work, education and entertainment. It is an open game world, a constellation of virtual planets. Users connect to OASIS with headsets, haptic gloves and suits. Regarding education, OASIS is much more than a public library containing all the worlds’ books freely and openly accessible to citizens. It presents a techno-utopic vision of virtual online education.

Journey towards the Metaverse

Metaverse, combination of the prefix meta (implying transcending) with the word universe, describes a hypothetical synthetic environment linked to the physical world. The journey starts with a piece of speculative fiction named Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson in 1992. In this novel, Stephenson defines the metaverse as a massive virtual environment parallel to the physical world, in which users interact through digital avatars. Since this first appearance, the metaverse as a computer-generated universe has been defined through vastly diversified concepts, such as lifelogging, collective space in virtuality, embodied internet/ spatial Internet, a mirror world, an omniverse: a venue of simulation and collaboration.

Metaverse is a virtual environment blending physical and digital, facilitated by the convergence between the Internet and Web technologies, and Extended Reality (XR). According to the Milgram and Kishino’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum, XR integrates digital and physical to various degrees, e.g., augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR). Similarly, the metaverse scene in Snow Crash projects the duality of the real world and a copy of digital environments. In the metaverse, all individual users own their respective avatars, in analogy to the user’s physical self, to experience an alternate life in a virtuality that is a metaphor of the user’s real worlds. To achieve such duality, the development of metaverse has to go through three sequential stages, namely digital twins,  digital natives, and eventually co-existence of physical-virtual reality or namely the surreality. 

• Digital twins refer to large-scale and high-fidelity digital models and entities duplicated in virtual environments. Digital twins reflect the properties of their physical counterparts, including the object motions, temperature, and even function. The connection between the virtual and physical twins is tied by their data. The existing applications are multitudinous such as computer-aided design (CAD) for product design and building architectures, smart urban planning, AI-assisted industrial systems, robot-supported risky operations

• After establishing a digital copy of the physical reality, the second stage focuses on native content creation. Content creators, perhaps represented by the avatars, involve in digital creations inside the digital worlds. Such digital creations can be linked to their physical counterparts, or even only exist in the digital world. Meanwhile, connected ecosystems, including culture, economy, laws, and regulations (e.g, data ownership), social norms, can support these digital creation. Such ecosystems are analogous to real-world society’s existing norms and regulations, supporting the production of physical goods and intangible contents. However, research on such applications is still in a nascent stage, focusing on the first contact point with users, such as input techniques and authoring system for content creation.

• In the third and final stage, the metaverse could become a self-sustaining and persistent virtual world that co-exists and interoperates with the physical world with a high level of independence. 

We consider the digital twins as a starting point, where our physical environments are digitised and thus own the capability to periodically reflect changes to their virtual counterparts. According to the physical world, digital twins create digital copies of the physical environments as ‘many’ virtual worlds, and human users with their avatars work on new creations in such virtual worlds, as digital natives. It is important to note that such virtual worlds will initially suffer from limited connectivity with each other and the physical world, i.e., information silo. They will then gradually connect within a massive landscape. Finally, the digitised physical and virtual worlds will eventually merge, representing the final stage of the co-existence of physical-virtual reality similar to the surreality). Such a connected physical-virtual world give rise to the unprecedented demands of perpetual and 3D virtual cyberspace as the metaverse.

This article reviews the existing technologies and technological infrastructures to offer a critical

lens for building up the metaverse characterised by perpetual, shared, concurrent, and 3D virtual spaces concatenating into a perceived virtual universe. Interdisciplinary nature of the metaverse requires explanation of relationship between the fourteen focused areas under two key categories of technologies and ecosystems, before we move on to the discussion on each focused area(s). The focused areas are grouped into two categories, where the technology supports the metaverse and its ecosystem as a gigantic application. 

• Under the technology aspect, i.e., the eight pillars for the metaverse, human users can access the metaverse through extended reality (XR) and techniques for user interactivity (e.g., manipulating virtual objects). Computer vision (CV), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and robotics/Internet-of-Things (IoT) can work with the user to handle various activities inside the metaverse through user interactivity and XR. Edge computing aims to improve the performance of applications that are delay-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry, through managing the local data source as pre-processing data available in edge devices, while cloud computing is wellrecognised for its highly scalable computational power and storage capacity. Leveraging both cloud-based and edge-based services can achieve a synergy, such as maximising the application performance and hence user experiences. Accordingly, edge devices and cloud services with advanced mobile network can support the CV, AI, robots, and IoT, on top of appropriate hardware infrastructure.

• The ecosystem describes an independent and meta-sized virtual world, mirroring the real world. Human users situated in the physical world can control their avatars through XR and user interaction technique for various collective activities such as content creation. Therefore, virtual economy is a spontaneous derivative of such activities in the metaverse. We consider three focused areas of Social acceptability, security and privacy, as well as trust and accountability. analogue to the society in the physical world, content creation and virtual economy should align with the social norms and regulations. For instance, the production in the virtual economy should be protected by ownership, while such production outcomes should be accepted by other avatars (i.e.,human users) in the metaverse. Also, human users would expect that their activities are not exposed to privacy risks and security threats.

Metaverse pre-histories

All our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. 

The metaverse is an excellent case in point. Its metamorphosis began in July 2021, when Facebook announced the concept as an immersive, rich digital world combining aspects of social media, online gaming, and augmented and virtual reality. 

Metaverse comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, which describes a computer-generated virtual world made possible by software and a worldwide fiber-optic network. In the three decades that have passed since Snow Crash was published, many of the underpinnings of Stephenson’s virtual world, such as social networks and artificial intelligence, have materialized. And the metaverse, like other ideas foreshadowed in the cyberpunk tradition, has persistently found its way into broader conversation. It has featured in recent movies such as Ready Player One and Free Guy. And it has shaped much of the digital landscape in which we now find ourselves. However, I think there might be more to the metaverse than just Snow Crash and its current re-instantiation. Nearly 20 years ago Linden Lab launched Second Life in 2003. However, I think there are even earlier histories that could inform our thinking. Before virtual and augmented reality. Before the web and the internet. Before mobile phones and personal computers. Before television, and radio, and movies. I think our history with proto-metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. 

Multiverse

The Multiverse with its different variables and realms offers a powerful experience design canvas to uncover hidden XR opportunities by fusing the real and the virtual, thereby creating cross-reality environments or so-called third spaces. Third spaces are created whenever one transverses the boundary between realms within any given experience (embodied virtuality / ubiquitous computing). The Multiverse consists of the following architectural components: 

• Dimensions.  There are the threewell-known physical dimensions – Space, Time, and Matter – that constitute our physical reality.

• Variables.  In addition, there are three nonphysical dimensions – referred to as No-Space,No-Time, andNo-Matter – that make up the virtual world.Unlike their physical counterparts, these three digital dimensions are not subject to the constraints imposed by physical space, time, and matter. Thus, in total there are six variables that can be exploited for the design of advanced XR experiences.

• Realms.  Given that there are three (3) pairs of variables, each with two (2) opposite physical/digital dimensions, we have a total of 23 = 8 possible realms. Each realm creates a different type of reality, ranging from conventional AR/AV to more sophisticated types of reality, e.g. mirrored virtuality, warped reality, and alternate reality. Mirrored virtuality absorbs the real world into the virtual and creates a virtual expression of reality that unfolds as it actually happens, providing a particular bird’s eye view. Warped reality plays with time in any way possible by taking an experience firmly grounded in reality and shifting it from actual to autonomous time. Alternate reality, on the other hand, creates an alternative view of the real world by constructing a digital experience and superimposing it onto a real place. Unlike AR, however, alternate reality manipulates time and allows looking to the future freed from the bonds of actual time.

Omniverse

The Omniverse is a set or number of supposedly co-existing parallel universes or contains archverses that forms all of existence. By definition, there is no way for anything in one universe to affect something in another. The multiverse/omniverse theory is not yet a scientific idea because there is no way to test it. An idea that cannot be tested or is not based on logic is not science. So it is not known if multiverse/omniverse is a scientific idea, just as antiverse. Antiverse or antiuniverse is the hypothesis that every universe has a twin to balance the symmetries between two universes. In the antiverse of our universe every matter would be antimatter and the time would run back (from our point of view).  

TECHNOLOGY OF THE METAVERSE

The underlying technologies that enable the metaverse have evolved over the years, making many of the features that were predicted in fiction possible. However, achieving a believable virtual world requires a confluence of new technologies and real-time, low-latency networking that can enable many participants to experience seamless interaction. Necessary advances include sense and even brain interfaces, which will further enhance immersion into the virtual world. These are the basis for augmented reality (AR) and VR achieved through advanced devices connected into a cloud computing back end. The geographic distribution of massive computation enabled by cloud computing is also needed to facilitate low-latency computation. In addition, running multiple metaverse deployments requires interoperability, which, in turn, requires standards and oversight. A metaverse ecosystem, including an informal architecture.

All objects in the virtual world have to exist in some context. Each physical artifact or individual requires representation in virtual worlds. People would be represented by avatars or simulations. Artifacts could be a digital twin or a simple object representation. Automating the virtual behaviors of both living things and moving/evolving objects requires automation and intelligence achieved using advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics. Each object in the virtual world should also have equal or similar security, privacy, and even personal or object boundaries that protect its real-world counterpart.

In the metaverse, the intersection between the economic and technological dimensions of virtual worlds is enabled by blockchain technology and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Transactions and charges in virtual worlds can be tracked even more naturally than in the physical world by using a distributed ledger. NFTs may achieve a degree of adoption regardless of the metaverse, but they are required in metaverse. Other economic aspects of the metaverse include trading and virtual markets as well as a number of verticals, such as gaming, manufacturing, and robotics.

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Perhaps the biggest mystery of this large-scale societal experiment that we call the metaverse is its effects on human and interpersonal interactions. The human species is highly social owing to its success, relative to other species, in interactions and collaborations. Conversely, humans are also reliant on social interactions for much of

their well-being and welfare. Like all animals, we evolved to interact with each other via physical cues.

The intersection of social and technological aspects in the metaverse is based on remote presence, which is becoming widely adopted due to COVID-19. Diversity, equity, and inclusion can be just as challenging to achieve in virtual worlds due to the large scale and rapid conversion of individuals of all types. On the positive side, it can be more easily programmatically assessed, and, on the negative side, avatars and digital twins hide identities, so biases and inequalities could be well hidden. Other aspects

of social dimensions include shared rules and behaviors, norms, and practices, all of which are yet to be developed for the metaverse. The same is true for context integrity, and all of this should lead to responsible principles. Finally, regulatory compliance and laws will be needed in the metaverse, as they are in the real world, although the legal foundation, norms, and enforcement might be different. For example, should actions that are socially unacceptable (or even unlawful) in the real world be allowed in the metaverse?

One of the economic areas that could potentially be profoundly affected is the everyday workplace for knowledge-intensive workers. The economic impact of this transition goes far beyond the mere reduction of commute hours and their associated waste and may be associated with increased productivity and higher efficiency in the job market, perhaps transforming it altogether.  An interesting question then arises: who controls and profits from this growing economy? If digital goods will trade freely in virtual worlds under open standards, in a way we are not currently seeing with any major platform, the impact on consumers may be more far reaching.

The intersection of technological and ecological development is based on sustainability. The metaverse inherently contributes to sustainability by eliminating the need for people to travel to meet and to produce physical artifacts. At the same time, running a metaverse consumes significant energy both in the data centers and at the edge. This shortcoming also applies to carbon emissions and water consumption.

Environmental impacts are only one of the health-related aspects of the metaverse. The technology is still early in its evolution, and we have only just started discovering the effects of the metaverse on human health, both negative and positive. On the negative

side, physical health risks include eye strain, visually induced motion sickness, epileptic seizures, and collisions with nearby objects.10–12 These risks are still areas of active research and development and may be addressed as the technology evolves. Nonphysical (mental) health risks include social isolation; dissociation from reality; the inability to interact with other human beings in the real world; anxiety; and false memory, especially in children. As with any technology, the metaverse can be also used and abused in harmful ways, especially for children. Some of these risks include privacy violations; abusive, harassing, or explicit behavior; bullying; and addiction.

On the other hand, virtual worlds also have many potential novel and beneficial applications in health care. Examples include telemedicine, immersive therapy sessions and diagnosis, exercise and fitness, and training surgeons in an environment tolerant of mistakes.

Health and safety concerns naturally lead to regulation, as these are fundamental societal concerns. In particular, regulators may be interested in curbing illegal and harmful activities while promoting economic and development opportunities. Large-scale economies such as the metaverse can potentially grow to a point where they become interesting to regulators. The metaverse may necessitate changes to taxation, job creation, the monitoring of criminal activities, and economic incentives, much as cryptocurrencies have. Regulators may also be interested in promoting and enforcing interoperability and antitrust laws for the metaverse. 

Similarly, regulators may also be interested in expanding the positive aspects of the metaverse to a broader population base. Since entry into the metaverse requires hardware, and hardware has a cost, it presents a barrier to entry to low-income populations. This barrier could further the digital divide and hinder efforts toward

increased diversity, equity, and inclusion in the metaverse. Societies and governments that are committed to bridging other social gaps in education, housing, health, and technology in general may, therefore, also introduce regulatory policies to increase

access to the metaverse.

APPLICATIONS AND BUSINESS CASES

Social networking (including Meta), industrial use, scientific discovery, and remote work—certainly, the business world has recognized the metaverse as a unique “commodity,” and there are many metaverse focused investment funds and exchange-traded funds.

Industry started to operate in the “metaverse” some 40 years ago with the adoption of CAD technologies. Over the years, those digital models created through CAD started to get used for simulation and became virtual components in libraries that could be used to design other products.

Then, those digital models created by different parties started to interact with one another in a global simulation of the product. In the beginning of this article, we also provided a brief history of flight simulators, which long ago became a mandatory element of a pilot’s curriculum.

Recently, these digital models have evolved to become digital twins. In addition to the digital model and its metadata, a digital twin has the capability to “shadow” the physical entity (providing up-to-date information on its status through data from embedded and ambient sensors) and keep the record of the evolution of the physical entity. Digital twins are now used in manufacturing as a component of the industry and as a bridge to explore the emerging metaverse. An engineer can, through VR goggles, explore a digital twin and learn about the associated physical entity. The digital twin can be used to train the operators of the physical entity. Sometimes this operation,

as in the case of the backhoes produced by Mevea, occurs in the metaverse before the actual physical entity is manufactured. It can continue in the metaverse as a way to operate from a remote physical entity.

Digital twins can also be used to better manage complex data sets, for example, in Earth observation applications, that come from sensors and satellites. Several efforts around the world are underway to create an “Earth digital twin” to process, monitor, consolidate, fuse, and assimilate Earth environment observations. This can improve the quality control of the data themselves and broaden the access to the model itself without exposing the raw data.

Another interesting and emerging use of digital twins is to generate synthetic training sets to teach AI/machine learning systems corner cases that may rarely occur in reality or to deal with domains in which manual labeling is too expensive. For example, imagine training an autonomous driving AI system. By using real test cars, it may take too long for rare events to occur, and the consequence of a bad decision in the real world may also be severe. In contrast, one could train an autonomous driving algorithm in the metaverse and “drive” millions of virtual miles, with all possible conditions of weather, unexpected behaviors, and so on, without harming anyone and with a more affordable and sustainable approach. The same can be said for virtual wind tunnels and so on.

The digital twins technology could also bring a deep economic impact. Combined with the metaverse and real-time communication, the digitization of real objects could transform economic experiences, such as online shopping or customer meetings. It may also boost scientific and economic development through the advent of the high-fidelity virtual simulation of complex physical objects and phenomena, such as architecture, traffic modeling, civil engineering, and manufacturing.

The metaverse is real

The metaverse is real, and it is coming — we even consider it a megatrend that will be an umbrella for many other technologies. While gaming was initially a popular application, there are many new practical applications, including industrial, financial, Earth sciences, and many others. Like any technology, there is always a fear that it could be misused. From the first days of machines, there has been such fear. Technology in its own right is not dangerous; rather, its use can be. Transparency and a well-regulated and governed metaverse should alleviate most concerns. As humanity embarks on more aggressive space exploration, leveraging the metaverse for such purposes could be essential in simulating where and how future communities will evolve.

The metaverse will become truly immersive once there are ways to experience it in a seamless way, with AR and VR devices that would bring our everyday life in a space where bits and atoms are seen as a continuum. It will also need to be persistent, live and

interoperable as ell as include a fully functioning economy. This will not likely happen before the end of this decade. Until that time, we will see the metaverse as a different space that can be used, exploited, and entertained.

Real-time borders

Compared with the 5G system, 6G will be completely based on AI infrastructure, it will behave as an "Intelligent Connectivity System” and will increase the border of the real time operation by a factor of 0.5% of the human computational power according to the following calculations: 

• Brain computation speed (about)=20 x10**15 operations per second (ops)

• Brain storage (about) = 100 TB

• Today's state-of-the art computer technology performs about 10**12 computations/sec, which is 4x orders of magnitude less than the speed of the human brain.

• 6G or 7G (by the year 2035) are likely to allocate up to 10 GHz RF channels for each user in the THz regime, supporting data rates of 100 Terabytes/sec, so the real time border (RTB) is given by 0.5% of the human computational power.

Coding for machines

Multimedia signals – speech, audio, images, video, point clouds, light fields, … – have traditionally been acquired, processed, and compressed for human use. However, it is estimated that in the near future, the majority of Internet connections will be machine-to-machine (M2M). So, increasingly, the data communicated across networks is primarily intended for automated machine analysis. Applications include remote monitoring, surveillance, and diagnostics, autonomous driving and navigation, smart homes / buildings / neighborhoods / cities, and so on. This necessitates rethinking of traditional compression and pre-/post-processing methods to facilitate efficient machine-based analysis of multimedia signals. As a result, standardization efforts such as MPEG VCM (Video Coding for Machines) and JPEG AI have been launched.

Both the theory and early design examples have shown that significant bit savings for a given inference accuracy are possible compared to traditional human-oriented coding approaches. However, a number of open issues remain. These include a thorough understanding of the tradeoffs involved in coding for machines, coding for multiple machine tasks, as well as combined human-machine use, model architectures, software and hardware optimization, error resilience, privacy, security, and others. The proposed workshop is intended to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government who are working on related problems, provide a snapshot of the current research and standardization efforts in the area, and generate ideas for future work. 

Visual communication

Visual communication is an area of study that investigates the transmission of ideas and information through visual forms and symbols. On a deeper level, it also looks at the cognitive and affective processes that affect the way we perceive (or sense) visual stimuli. Seeing is one thing and perceiving is another! The former has to do with the objective realities of sight, while the latter has to do with the transmission of culture and meaning. 

• Content and Form.  Visual communication involves the interaction of content and form. Content is the tangible essence of a work: the stories, ideas, and information that we exchange with others. Form is the manner in which content is designed, packaged, and delivered for consumption. Content relates to what we want to say, while form has to do with how we choose to express it or communicate it. Content and form are complementary components of a visual design. Both are required for success.

• Aesthetics.  We make perceptual judgments about visual beauty every day. While content, function, and usability are important, our affinity for things is greatly affected by our perceptions of outward beauty or appearance. This is true for the physical objects we eat, wear, drive, live in, or otherwise enjoy; as well as for artistic works or media products that we interact with visually. Our aesthetic sensibilities vary widely depending on many factors including context and place.

• Elements of design.  Design is the strategic arrangement of visual elements within a two-dimensional space to form a unified and holistic impression. Sometimes, the word composition is used as an alternative way of describing the same process. The elements of design are the fundamental building blocks of visual content. This section focuses on eight elements of design that are common to all forms of visual communication: space (2D/3D, positive/negative), dot, line (straight/curved), shape (organic/synthetic), form (lighting), texture, pattern, and color (hue, saturation, brightness).

Principles of design

The principles of design are formal rules and concepts for optimizing the arrangement and presentation of two-dimensional visual elements. The 12 general principles covered in this section fall into the broad categories of unity,  emphasis, and  perceptual forces. 

• Principles of unity (proximity, alignment, similarity, repetition) can be thought of as the perceptual glue that holds a design together and maintains a sense of visual harmony. 

• Principles of emphasis (value-contrast, color-contrast, depth of field, proportion) address the need for maintaining a visual focal point. They also relate to the way  designers designate the importance or weight of the subject matter. Emphasis is often used to communicate to the viewer the relative importance of visual objects or information in a design. 

• Principles of perceptual force (balance, continuation-vectors, figure-ground, psychological closure) help us to understand some of the psychological processes that affect the way we interact with visual content within a frame. 

Data visualization from clay tablets to the industrial metaverse

What do clay tablets from the Minoan civilization and the industrial metaverse have in common? Despite being from completely different ends of the technology spectrum, they essentially do the same job – visualizing data. From recording sales transactions 11,000 years ago to monitoring some of our most sophisticated technological marvels today, data visualization has been an important part of civilization. It has grown in sophistication as we have needed to visualize and manage growing amounts of data that change at an ever-increasing rate. This session takes you on a journey over that 11,000-year period, showing how we as humans have thought of data and needed to visualize it. From tables in clay to maps and charts, and onwards to structures so complex that the metaverse becomes the perfect tool for visualizing live data that updates sometimes many times a second. We’ll look at the tools and technologies that tame this data and provide the building blocks for the industrial metaverse, discuss the problems of visualizing large amounts of data, and then get hands-on with a demo showing how the industrial metaverse can visualize data from the international space station in near-real-time.

[2015-2023]  Dragorad Milovanovic

META2023

Podrazumeva se jedinstven metaprostor u budućnosti, ali za sada postoji veliki broj malih nezavisnih metaverzuma koji su se počeli pojavljivati nakon 2000. Virtuelnim svetovima pristupa se preko kompjutera, tableta, igračkih konzola ili mobilnih telefona, ali će se u budućnosti sveopšta povezanost metaverzumom ostvariti korišćenjem slušalica za virtuelnu realnost, naočara za proširenu realnost, kao i odgovarajućih aplikacija za pametne mobilne telefone i druge uređaje.

Malim metaverzumima mogu se, najpre, smatrati digitalni svetovi kompjuterskih igara (RPG – Role Playing Game), u kome se igrači uživo takmiče s drugim igračima i likovima. Najpopularnije među tim igrama su Roblox (pojavio se 2006), Minecraft (2011) i Fortnite (2017). Igranje ovih igara uživo s drugim igračima i likovima ispunjava sve kriterijume paralelnog virtuelnog sveta – metaverzuma, s obzirom na to da svaka od tih igara predstavlja zajednicu koja je neprekidno u porastu, ima sopstvenu valutu, kao i mogućnost zarade na platformi. Osim igara, 21. vek je doneo i niz drugih metaverzuma u kojima je organizovan paralelni život poput života u realnom svetu. Među prvima takav je bio Second Life (Linden Labs, San Francisko, 2003). Usledili su novi metaverzumi, a jedan od najpopularnijih je Decentraland (Decentraland Foundation). Tu su i Sandbox (Pixowl Inc.), PolkaCity (Miramar), SuperWorld (Hrish Lotlikar i Max Woon), Voxels (Ben Nolan)…

U virtuelnim svetovima stvarni ljudi komuniciraju u realnom vremenu preko svojih likova – avatara. Oni se u tim svetovima okupljaju, druže, imaju svoj posao i način života i ponašanja, a poseduju i tzv NFT nekretnine, čiji naziv potiče od izraza non-fungible tokeni. To su zapravo kriptografski tokeni koji obeležavaju digitalnu i fizičku imovinu. Metapodaci svakog NFT-a su obezbeđeni na blokčejnu i služe kao dokaz autentičnosti i vlasništva. Na taj način su potpuno zaštićeni od modifikacije i falsifikovanja. 

Decentarland je pravi virtuelni svet koji je vlasništvo njegovih korisnika. Razvoj ove platforme otpočeo je 2015. godine, a razvili su ga argentinski inženjeri Esteban Ordano i Ariel Meilich. Za javnost je otvoren februara 2020. godine. Fokus ovog metaverzuma je na izgradnji i posedovanju NFT virtuelnog prostora pod nazivom „zemlja“, koji se može podeliti na parcele. Ima ukupno 96.601 parcela s tačno definisanom lokacijom i koordinatama. Parcele se kupuju pomoću Mana, tokena kriptovalute Ethereum. Nakon prijavljivanja, kada kreirate svoj digitalni novčanik i kupite svoju parcelu, trajno ćete imati svoje zemljište. Pošto imate potpunu kontrolu nad svojim digitalnim okruženjem, slobodni ste da radite s njim šta god želite. Ovo uključuje izgradnju struktura, razvoj igara ili bavljenje umetnošću. Ako ne želite da ga koristite, možete da ga prodate ili iznajmite. 

Jedan od tipičnih primera aktivnog korišćenja nekretnina u metaverzumu je virtuelni prostor koji je kupila vizuelna umetnica iz Velike Britanije Angie Thompson, specijalizovana za ilustracije, izradu različitih predmeta i vizuelno pripovedanje, priređivanje različitih umetničkih događaja i inovativnih radionica. Prvi virtuelni plac kupila je 2020. po ceni od 1.500 funti u metaverzumu Voxels. U ovom metaverzumu tokom prethodne godine na kupovinu parcela potrošeno je oko 22 miliona dolara. Na svojim parcelama umetnica je napravila dve virtuelne galerije prepune neobičnih i atraktivnih digitalnih umetničkih dela. Njene galerije (parcele u metaverzumu) veličine su klasične porodične kuće s tri sprata, s velikom terasom na krovu. Iz vazduha dobija se pravi utisak atraktivnosti ovog sveta, a oko njene galerije nalazi se niz drugih parcela. Cilj umetnice je da na tom prostoru promoviše svoja umetnička dela, ali i dela drugih autora, organizujući različite umetničke događaje. Na tim zadacima kreće se njen avatar sa ogromnom tamnocrvenom čirokana frizurom i neizbežnom cigaretom u ustima. Izložena umetnička dela prodaju se za kriptovalute.

Jedna od oblasti koja je najspremnija da se upusti u sve izazove i rizike oglašavanja i poslovanja u metaverzumu upravo je modna industrija. Adidas i Gucci kupili su zemlju i grade iskustva za promociju i prodaju proizvoda i usluga u Sandbox-u. Od maja 2022. Gucci je radio i u Roblox-u u okviru svog Gucci Town-a. Njihov prostor sadrži centralnu baštu koja povezuje različite druge prostore u okruženju – kafić, mini-igre, virtuelnu prodavnicu… 

Za razvoj jedinstvenog metaverzuma očekuje se da će biti potrebno najmanje 10 godina. Potencijal metaverzuma se procenjuje da tokom narednih decenija postane deo svetske ekonomije vredan više triliona dolara.

6G METAVERSE PROJECTS

This section provides an overview of research projects and developments that are already underway towards realizing the Metaverse by harnessing the extreme network capabilities of envisioned B5G and 6G mobile networks.

• META, formerly known as Facebook, is presently working on combining social media with VR and AR towards realizing the Metaverse for users to work, play and interact with other users online. This is possible due to the extreme mobile broadband capabilities, near zero latency, extreme reliability and availability, and network intelligence of emerging mobile networks. Users can join the Metaverse using VR head- sets. The envisaged applications will range from connecting people, education, training, healthcare and the workplace to gaming. For instance, education technologies are expected to broaden their horizons from platforms to passively absorb information to learn by doing and experiencing through 3D immersion. In addition, Meta is working on building the Metaverse responsibly ensuring a safe, secure, and transpar- ent operation. Meta has also launched the Meta Immersive Learning Academy and Research Fund to collaborate in building a solid and interoperable Metaverse platform. In addition, their Spark AR platform enables the creation and sharing of AR experiences through their apps and devices. Furthermore, Meta is working on building economic oppor- tunities in the Metaverse to maintain and thrive in a digital economy in the future.

• VR HIVE aims to transform e-learning through VR from the comfort of home or workplace. This project aims to design and develop a fully immersive learning platform over 6G mobile networks to feature the Metaverse that can be used to provide education, training, holographic telepresence, and real-time communication. These features will be provided through the extreme network capabilities of emerging 6G networks, such as, near real-time ultra-reliable communica- tion with ultra-low latency and edge intelligence. Relevant infrastructure and network-aware immersive and adaptive en- vironments will be developed to facilitate education through the range of products offered through VR Hive.

• 6G LIFE aims to facilitate the envisaged digital transfor- mation where 6G mobile networks will play a significant role in this revolution. The project not only aims to develop the digital infrastructure and high-performance computing plat- forms but also concentrates on political and social issues that are required to realize future 6G applications. Realizing 6G applications will require diverse communication capabilities including human-machine interaction in virtual worlds, such as the Metaverse. The project aims to provide innovative so- lutions in the areas of scalable communication, flexible soft- ware concepts, and adaptive hardware platforms. The four key aspects considered by the project are latency, resilience, security and sustainability. The research work, including both basic and applied research, is mainly performed considering Industry 4.0/5.0, and intelligent healthcare applications.

• DECENTRALAND is a decentralized virtual world where users can create objects, trade and interact with others in a virtual world. This also allows users to control policies on the operation of the virtual world. Decentraland operates as a De- centralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), where it owns smart contracts and assets on virtual land and estate contracts, wearables and other devices, and the marketplace to trade vir- tual assets. These developments can be realized through the capabilities of emerging 6G mobile networks, where extreme mobile connectivity will facilitate seamless connectivity to the virtual world. Furthermore, blockchain operation and smart contract execution will be enabled through the edge computing capabilities of the 6G networks. Similar projects, such as Sandbox, Axie Infinity, and Illuvium also envisage harnessing the capabilities of blockchain and emerging mobile networks towards realizing the Metaverse.

• LUXEMBOURG METAVERSE project aims to build a digital twin of an area of Luxembourg City. These digital twins can be explored by the public and the industry to provide multiple working opportunities. Luxemburg 5G-6G network digital twin aims to enable seamless and highly capable network connectivity to facilitate real-time services banking on emerging communication networks, such as be- yond 5G and 6G. This project will also raise awareness of the advantages and applications of the Metaverse to the public and the industry. Furthermore, the project expects to optimise and secure the Metaverse deployments while integrating the latest developments of networks in a cost-effective and cost- efficient manner. 

Fusion of digital and real worlds: Multiverse vs. Metaverse

Multiverse as an interesting attempt to help realize the fusion of digital and real worlds. The Multiverse offers eight different types of reality, including but not limited to VR and AR. 

A term closely related to the Multiverse is the recently emerging Metaverse. Metaverse will be the precursor of the Multiverse. Specifically, the Metaverse might be viewed as the next step after the Internet, similar to how the mobile Internet expanded and enhanced the early Internet in the 1990s and 2000s. The various adventures that this place has to offer will surround us both socially and visually. The Metaverse is unique in that it spans a wide range of interconnected platforms as well as the digital and physical worlds underpinned by decentralized Web3 technology.

Metaverse: The next Big Thing?

TheMetaverse is a new realm that will combine the actual and virtual worlds. It is all about virtual experiences and digital assets. Among others, the Metaverse ought to have the following main characteristics: (i) It must be a shared experience; just as it is in the real world, we get to witness events as they unfold; (ii) it must be possible to purchase and sell things to each other in a virtual economy; (iii) it has to be possible for people to participate in activities that combine the real and virtual worlds.

Multisensory media (Mulsemedia)

Although humans have five basic senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, most multimedia systems today only capture two of them, namely, sight and hearing. With the development of the metaverse and related technologies, there is a growing need for a more immersive media format that leverages all human senses. Multisensory media (Mulsemedia) that can stimulate multiple senses will play a critical role in the near future. 

The past several decades have seen significant progress in the development of multimedia communication and networking. Although the quality of video and audio has greatly improved, this has come at the cost of streaming high volumes of data through both wireless and wired networks. In recent years, the emergence of extended Reality (XR), digital twins, digital currency, and Holographic‑Type Communication (HTC) has led to the development of the metaverse. However, the multimedia used in the metaverse only stimulates sight and hearing, neglecting three other fundamental human senses: touch, smell, and taste. For the metaverse to become a reality where users can live and work as if they were in the real world, all five human senses must be addressed and stimulated to create a fully immersive experience. This calls for a new format of multimedia that can incorporate multiple human senses.

Mulsemedia research emerged in 2010 and it stands for media that includes three or more human senses. Although this concept is relatively new, the employment of humans’ senses beyond sight and hearing in film theaters started about one century ago. The invention of television in 1927 attracted many film customers.

Film theaters started to come up with novel technologies to bring more customers back. The first film that adopted extra human senses is Mein Traum in the 1940s, which uses a so called “smell‑o‑drama” to release odors into the theater. However, this technology was not widely adopted due to a lack of mature support. Around 1960, more attempts appeared in film theaters, including the famous “AromaRama” and “Smell‑O‑Vision” which release scents through different systems into theaters. Also, vibration was employed beneath seats. After this, the first 4D film was screened in 1984, incorporating multiple humans’ senses, such as vibration and scent. Nowadays, the 4DX format provides richer human senses for 4D films. Moreover, significant efforts were also spent to create high‑quality media for other human senses besides sight and hearing. For example, digital scent technology has been available for a long time and some devices can be integrated with modern XR headsets. 

In the past decade, researchers have developed various mulsemedia prototypes which use a range of senses, including scent, light, moisture, wind, haptic, and kinesthetic effects. To create mulsemedia content, annotators manually add information about wind speed, light intensity, and scent to videos, which are then played together at the client side. These pioneering works have proven the feasibility of mulsemedia communications, and results have shown that mulsemedia can significantly improve the Quality‑of‑Experience (QoE).

The metaverse and the 6G wireless systems have significantly changed the development of mulsemedia. First, the metaverse aims to provide seamless connections between the physical world and the virtual world, which demands truly immersive user experiences that can utilize more human senses beyond sight and hearing. This is the major driving application of mulsemedia communications. Second, the 6G wireless systems will provide ubiquitous connectivity with high data rates and low latency which enable mobile mulsemedia communications. Existing mulsemedia technologies are mainly used in 4D theaters due to complex sensing and display systems and high requirements on communication system performance. As a result, users have limited access to mulsemedia. The 6G wireless systems can dramatically change this situation by providing high‑performance wireless communication for mulsemedia sensors, actuators and displays which can be embedded in computers and smart devices. 

Metahuman: Unleashing the infinite potential of humans

In the new sustainable era in human history, human development will consist of actions that use the very best of biomimicry as well as the mutually beneficial symbiosis between digitalization and biologization. To unleash the full potential of biologization for the purpose of human development, it is helpful to better understand the biological uniqueness of humans and their possible evolution into future meta-humans with infinite capabilities.

Metaverse and 6G wireless systems

The metaverse is defined as a hypothetical synthetic environment which is linked to the physical world. Users can interact with each other in the virtual environment provided by the metaverse. The metaverse is anticipated to become the next iteration of the Internet, consisting of immersive and hyperreal 3D digital virtual content. Technologies such as digital twins, avatars, and holograms enable the recreation and enrichment of the physical world in the metaverse. In addition to replicating physical environments, the metaverse allows for the creation of virtual information, objects, avatars, and environments that do not exist in the physical world. The integration of real and virtual content in the metaverse can greatly enhance user capabilities for work, entertainment, education, healthcare, and manufacturing. 

The metaverse will come in various formats, ranging from simple computer games to complex digital twins, enabling a plethora of novel applications, such as entertainment, gaming, industrial design and simulation, and more. Cryptocurrency also plays an important role in the metaverse. Virtual currencies and assets based on Non‑Fungible Tokens (NFTs), blockchain, and Web 3.0 enable social economics in virtual worlds with highsecurity levels. Moreover, blockchain and Web 3.0 provide fully distributed services and protect users’ digital identities.

Users of the metaverse expect hyperreal and immersive virtual content that are compute and data‑intensive. Interaction with other users or virtual content in the metaverse demands ultra‑low end‑to‑end latency and ultra‑high reliability to avoid causing discomfort, such as dizziness, to users. As a result, the metaverse requires ultra‑high data rates, ultra‑high reliability, and ultra‑low latency communications with computation capabilities in both core and edge networks. While 5G wireless systems have started the creation and development of the metaverse, providing high QoE services for the metaverse remains a challenge. 5G wireless systems are equipped with a range of services that can support metaverse applications, especially the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and Ultra‑Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). eMBB provides high data rates and the URLLC prioritizes high reliability and low latency. However, the metaverse demands technologies that can integrate both of them simultaneously. It also requires various other services that are not available in 5G wireless systems, such as integrated communication and sensing and the deterministic networking with bounded end‑to‑end latency.

The 6G wireless system is anticipated to provide ubiquitous, high‑speed, low‑latency, and ultrareliable connectivity simultaneously, which is the convergence of the eMBB, URLLC, and other services of 5G wireless systems. These innovative services will be made possible by advancements in all‑spectrum communications, including mmWave communications, terahertz communications, optical communications, joint communication and sensing, space‑terrestrial integrated networks, cubesat networks, deterministic networks, mobile edge computing, arti􀏐icial intelligence, and other technologies. The physical world will be fully interconnected from space to air, terrestrial, maritime, indoor, and underground environments via 6G wireless systems. This will provide global coverage and seamless connection between the virtual world and the physical world. The cloud and edge networks, equipped with new architectures and frameworks, can facilitate the delivery of new services and capabilities to support metaverse applications. The QoE of the metaverse is expected to be significantly improved by leveraging 6G wireless technologies in communications, networking, caching, and computation, and using flexible and lightweight wireless devices. 

Toward 6G: A new era of convergence

6G should not only explore more spectrum at high-frequency bands but, more importantly, converge driving technological trends. 

Karakteristike i značenje imerzivnog iskustva

• Od klasičnog istraživanja do modernog iskustva. Imerzivna iskustva imaju duboku vezu sa ljudskom evolucijom. Ljudska bića su prošla kroz dugi istorijski proces čežnje i razvijanja imersivnih iskustava. Sa razvojem ljudskog nervnog sistema i sistema razmišljanja, ljudi su rano formirali složen sistem percepcije, iskustva i pamćenja i kontinuirano širili svoj raspon iskustava kroz svoju jedinstvenu maštu. Proces sticanja ovakvih iskustava istovremeno je i neumoran proces izgradnje i istraživanja, i razigran proces sticanja velikog zadovoljstva i lepote. Još u antičko grčko doba, Platon je opisao karakteristike čulnog iskustva. U svojoj analizi heraklitskog svijeta, Nietzsche je istakao da igra nije proizvoljna igra, već izuzetno posvećena kreacija, koja može endogeno formirati poredak. Ovo je misterija njegovog velikog zadovoljstva: Kao što nužnost i igra, borba i harmonija moraju koegzistirati da bi se rodilo umjetničko djelo. Nietzscheova razlika između boga sunca i boga vina također je inspirisala buduće generacije da razmišljaju: ako se plastična i muzička umjetnost koju predstavljaju bog sunca i bog vina miješaju, integrirajući čula vida, sluha i dodira, moguće je postepeno transformisati subjektivno u stanje zaborava kako strast raste. Ova vrsta imerzivnog iskustva postala je divno carstvo kojem ljudska bića teže.

• Od stvarnih iskustava do izmišljenih svetova.  Imerzivna iskustva su ušla u naprednu fazu sa napretkom produktivnost. Prije industrijskog društva, zbog ograničenja tehnološke opreme i nivoa potrošnje, imerzivna iskustva koja su ljudi stekli često su bila fragmentirana i povremena i teško da su mogla postati široko rasprostranjen oblik potrošnje. Kada su ljudska bića ušla u postindustrijsku eru, potrošnja ljudi prešla je fazu traženja jeftine i dobre kvalitete, vrijednosti za novac i punog uživanja. Primjena novih audiovizualnih, umjetne inteligencije, 5G, AR, VR i drugih tehnologija omogućava izvodljivost prakse, odnosno uz pomoć tehnološke opreme i kreativnog dizajna, da se kvalitetno iskustvo razvije u oblik potrošnje visoke vrijednosti. Dok poljoprivredna ekonomija pruža prirodne proizvode, industrijska ekonomija obezbeđuje standardizovana dobra, a uslužna ekonomija pruža prilagođene usluge, ekonomija iskustva pruža personalizovana iskustva. Kada standardizovani proizvodi, roba i usluge počnu da imaju višak kapaciteta, samo iskustvo je nosilac visoke vrednosti kojeg nedostaje. Kao ekonomski provajder u postindustrijskoj eri, iskustvo je događaj koji svakome omogućava da učestvuje na personalizovan način. On pokreće transformaciju poslovanja u više sektora od standardizirane robe i usluga do pružanja širokog spektra personaliziranih iskustava. Ova iskustva uključuju bajkovito iskustvo koje nudi Diznilend, osećaj košarkaške slave koju donosi brend Jordan, i luksuznu zabavu koju pokazuju Armani odela. Imerzivno iskustvo, s druge strane, je iskustvo visoke vrijednosti stvoreno integracijom puno tehnologije, inteligencije i kreativnosti u postindustrijskom društvu.To je visoko integrirana forma vođena tematskim dizajnom, dizajnirana prema modernoj logici i efektivno kontrolirana inteligentnim sredstvima, koja spaja višestruka iskustva. To je simbolički sistem pažljivo dizajniran, kreiran, kojim upravljaju i prodaju ga profesionalci organizacije i uslužni proces koji uranja publiku u to. Kada se iskustvo uranjanja završi, ljudi ga još uvijek njeguju jer je njegova vrijednost u njihovim srcima i umovima i traje.  Želja za tako vrijednim i nezaboravnim imerzivnim iskustvima postala je sve snažnija potražnja potrošača u postindustrijskom društvu i granica područje koje vodi ka unapređenju potrošača.

• Formiranje punog iskustva i super šoka.  Imerzivno iskustvo ima bogatu tehnološku konotaciju i humanističku vrijednost. Promovirano modernom naprednom tehnologijom, imerzivno iskustvo postaje omotana, multi-senzorna, trenutna i kontrolna industrijska forma koja integrira hardversku opremu i softverski sadržaj. Ona nadilazi tradicionalne medije izvođačkih umjetnosti,film led displej, muziku i izložbu, i formira režim usluge koji uključuje vizuelna, slušna i taktilna iskustva, pružajući ljudima nezaboravno iskustvo koje integriše različite audiovizuelne efekte i više medija, delujući na celo telo i um. Posebno je važno napomenuti da imerzivno iskustvo sadrži bogatu modernu logiku. Kada stvara različite iskustvene jedinice, ne samo da slijedi tradicionalnu formalnu logiku i emocionalnu logiku, već i usvaja mnogo rezultata temporalne logike, kvantne logike i viševrijedne logike, stvarajući tako alternativni prostor-vrijeme koje odražava i slobodnu maštu. i duboku logičku snagu. Kao što je rekao Harvey Fischer, predsjednik Međunarodne federacije multimedijalnih asocijacija, iako je digitalno kraljevstvo u suštini tehnologija i binarni kod, ono oslobađa najnebeskiju maštu u svakom polju ljudskog poduhvata. Pored primjene u medicinskim, inženjerskim, obučnim i vojnim oblastima, imerzivno iskustvo se razvilo u visokovrijednu kulturnu uslugu u području kulturnih industrija. Sa tematskim narativima kao fokusom, imerzivnim audiovizuelnim efektima i modernom logikom kao strukturom, pruža ljudima trijadno vrednosno iskustvo, tj. direktno čulno iskustvo, indirektno emocionalno iskustvo i introspektivno filozofsko iskustvo. Sadašnje imerzivno iskustvo postaje jedna od novih industrija u oblasti kulturne industrije sa vrlo snažnom inovativnom vitalnošću i bogatim i raznolikim izrazima. Imerzivno iskustvo izražava duboko humanističko značenje. Omogućava publici da uđe u izmišljeni svijet iz stvarnog iskustva, prenoseći kreatorevu novu interpretaciju i izraz unutrašnjeg poretka sebe, svega, svijeta i svemira. Kao što izraelski naučnik Yuval Hilarie ističe u Kratkoj istoriji čovečanstva, sposobnost pričanja izmišljenih priča je izuzetno važan skok u ljudskoj evoluciji. Zaista jedinstvena funkcija ljudskog jezika je da raspravlja o izmišljenim stvarima. Samo ljudi mogu raspravljati o stvarima koje zapravo ne postoje i vjerovati u malo vjerojatne stvari. Velika uloga izmišljenih priča leži u njihovoj sposobnosti da iskoriste moć mašte i logike kako bi spojili ljude sa zajedničkom vizijom kako bi oživjeli fikciju. Ovo je osnovni razlog zašto je moć ljudi uvećana i može dominirati svijetom više od bilo koje druge životinje8.To je također jedan od razloga zašto su imerzivna iskustva tako moćna.Iskustvo uranjanja rekodira sve vrste audiovizuelnih simbola i uvodi ljude u alternativni prostor-vrijeme sastavljen od temporalne logike, kvantne logike i logike više vrijednosti, što uvelike potiče radoznalost i maštu ljudi. Kako se kaže, Dan u pećini je hiljadu godina na svijetu. Zato što usvaja ritam prostorno-vremenskog kretanja i simboličku logičku strukturu koja se veoma razlikuje od svakodnevnog života ljudi, od dijaloga s genijalnim naučnikom i umjetnikom Da Vinčijem prije 500 godina, do budućeg svijeta 2050. godine, do međuzvjezdanih putovanja i posjeta na Mars. Oni su fantastični i nalik na snove, ali očigledno stvarni svijet koji funkcionira autonomno. S obzirom na to, imerzivno iskustvo, kao svojevrsna moderna potrošnja iskustva, ima karakteristične karakteristike velikog čuda, super šoka, punog iskustva i logičke snage. Iskustvo koje ljudi stječu u svakodnevnom životu, ili u prirodnom pejzažu, tradicionalnom filmu i zabavi, može biti samo jedno od njih. Samo u okviru imerzivnog iskustva ova četiri aspekta mogu biti u potpunosti integrisana.

AUGMENTED/VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE METAVERSE — BRINGING THE PIECES TOGETHER

The metaverse is still years away, but the buildup to this future will engender new UXs and market opportunities. As highlighted, video will certainly be a critical piece of the metaverse, but this future also speaks to the convergence and interoperability of other platforms and technologies. What may have operated as individual pieces will come together to form a new whole under the metaverse. Part and parcel to this change will be the arrival of mainstream smart glasses, which will provide an always-on immersive experience. While this class of smart glasses is not expected to begin arriving until 2024 at the earliest, there are near-term opportunities that could take advantage of 5G if certain criteria are met.

The first football match in the Metaverse [May 2022.]

Top Italian soccer league Serie A livestreamed Sunday’s match between AC Milan and ACF Fiorentina inside the Serie A room in Nemesis metaverse. The stream was exclusively available to fans in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area and was part of Serie A’s collaboration with blockchain software company ConsenSys and virtual worlds platform The Nemesis. Launched in 2019, The Nemesis is free to use and provides access to other live experiences including concerts, parties, and challenges with friends. Fans had to make an account with the Consensys-owned cryptocurrency wallet app MetaMask to access NFTs that acted as a user’s ticket into the match broadcast on The Nemesis. The online room lets fans watch the game while interacting with each other’s digital avatars, play games related to Serie A and view augmented live stats from the match. 

The Lega Serie A becoming the first football league to broadcast a match on the Metaverse. After releasing the first NFT a few months ago, Lega Serie A will once again be a pioneer aware of the fact that technological innovations now pave the way for revolutionary broadcasting possibilities with a view to reaching and involving more and more fans around the world, not just in Italy. Not only Serie A, but also Manchester City, a few months ago, expressed the will to build a stadium in the metaverse. 

Human digital migration

The process of people migrating into the metaverse is likely to be complex and multifaceted, bringing with it positive and negative impacts. As people spend more time in these environments, their immersive nature may have implications that span widely from new opportunities to interact, connect, experience, learn and work; to challenges related to security, discrimination, addiction, misconduct, and abuse.

This process, now in its nascent phase, is being shaped by the infrastructure and technologies that underpin the Internet as we know it, baking in all the unintended consequences of Web 2.0. Given that reality, it is important to carefully consider potential implications and leverage lessons learned from the approximately 34-year history of the Internet, including how it dovetails into the interactive era and now into the metaverse.

A brief history of the Internet

The first iteration of the Internet, often referred to as Web 1.0, started as read only, a one-way interaction consisting of consumption by the user (an example is static websites). The following version, which is often referred to as Web 2.0, evolved into read and write by creating a two-way engagement, where users can consume and create (one example is social media).

Web 3.0, the computing era that follows the mobile-powered Web 2.0 is often identified with the “Semantic Web”, which centres on the capability of machines to read and interact with content in a manner more akin to humans. Recently, definitions of Web 3.0 have begun to include distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, focusing on their ability to authenticate and decentralize information. Theoretically, this could remove the power of platform owners over individual users.

The Internet’s history starts in about 1962, but it was not until 1983 that the modern Internet was born with ARPANET’s (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) transformation into Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf’s Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP.

The subsequent subsections present a joint human journey into the metaverse as part of the history of the Internet (Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0) through various iterations, including milestones relating to the Internet’s transition from passive viewing of often static content to the interoperability and collaborative consumption that has given rise to today’s participatory culture; starting with Table 1 below as follows:

1. Internet milestones and history from 1962 to 2021 (Table 1).

2. Milestones of the interactive era (through the history of the gaming industry) from 1972 to today (Figure 1).

3. History and milestones of the metaverse from 1838 to today (Figure 2 and Table 2).