Introduction to the IEEE MetaVZine
By Peter Corcoran, University of Galway
IEEE Metaverse Newsletter, 2024
Welcome to our first issue of the IEEE MetaVZine — the IEEE Metaverse Initiative Newsletter. This is the place to find out about Metaverse-related activities, publications, and services within IEEE.
As this is our first issue let me first introduce the IEEE Metaverse Initiative and tell you about the Future Directions Committee steering the development of this cross-community activity within IEEE. Firstly, our mission statement:
Our mission is to promote the seamless integration of the digital and physical worlds through the Metaverse, unlocking new opportunities for individuals and industries in their academic, personal, professional, and social lives.
We are committed to achieving this by establishing standards, fostering collaboration, and promoting open data with the ultimate goal of overcoming economic, ethical, and technological challenges. Our vision is to create an accessible, inclusive, and transformative Metaverse that empowers people from all walks of life to connect, learn, and thrive. This work is supported by various technical communities and we expect that additional communities will join and support our work as we build momentum.
You can learn more about the steering committee here.
Overview of the Newsletter
As this is our first issue it may be a little sparse. Kindly bear with us as we build up new and exciting insights into the Metaverse, drawing on the large repository of knowledge and expertise of the members of IEEE.
Each issue we’ll feature an overview of Metaverse related events, conferences and general news items. We’ll also have a short profile on a member of the IEEE Metaverse steering committee – this issue the selected member is myself, Peter Corcoran, your newsletter editor. And we also have the Metaverse snapshot, which I will explain below. You can access all these items via the upper-right-hand menu of the main newsletter cover page.
In addition we’ll feature a number of guest articles focussed on different aspects of the Metaverse. This issue, to get things started I’ve asked members of our committee to select the article they feel best answers the question “What is the Metaverse?” I’ve also provided some of my own thoughts on the metaverse in my article: “The MetaVerse in 2024: A Brave New World or a Tomorrow that Never Arrives?
The Metaverse Snapshot
For this first issue our main contribution is the Metaverse Snapshot from June 2024. This snapshot is a selection of IEEE publications during the first 6 months of the year and has been sorted into a range of sub-categories. Here you can access the full spectrum of IEEE publications related to the Metaverse. Naturally these span a wide range of subject areas and research topics, but it is a good place to start your own Metaverse journey.
In future issues we will feature more in-depth articles covering various aspects of the Metaverse and associated technologies and research fields but for now the newsletter team has opted to sort these many and varied works into a number of top-level categories. Here is a quick overview of what is in the Metaverse Snapshot provided as part of this newsletter.
Education is the first area where the Metaverse is already having impact. Here we can find articles on Education 4.0, Personalized and Federated learning and the digital twinning of teachers and educators. This issue we feature 10 articles drawn from the wealth of IEEE publications addressing these and other topics in Metaverse Education.
Our 2nd category is that of the Industrial Metaverse and Digital Twinning. Here 10 articles cover a diverse range of topics ranging from smart-manufacturing and edge computing to consumer healthcare and wireless communications technologies. The new insights that a range of Metaverse related technologies can bring to various industry sectors is covered by this category within the Metaverse snapshot.
The Medical and Healthcare aspects of Metaverse are covered by our next main category. Metaverse technologies can contribute in many ways to this key sector. Some may overlap as there are education-related and digital twinning aspects, but given the broad societal impacts of the medical and healthcare sector we have kept this as a top-level category.
Now IEEE has a core focus on technology, so it is not surprising that we have a top-level category on Foundation Technologies for the Metaverse. Here we have more than 50 articles with sub-categories covering computing, communications, virtual and augmented reality, and authentication technologies; digital security and transportation sector cross-linkages with Metaverse and more esoterically quantum-computing linkages with Metaverse. It is likely that we’ll see additional subcategories appearing here in future issues.
Next we have Metaverse and Society which discusses societal aspects of the Metaverse in more than a dozen articles, followed by our final category which covers Implementations of Metaverse — actual practical embodiments or techniques that are important in building the practical virtual worlds of the Metaverse.
For each article in the Metaverse Snapshot you can click-through to find a link to the original article which can be accessed via IEEE Xplore. Note that the majority of articles referenced in the snapshot are open-access, but there may be some that still require additional access privileges. Also note that this snapshot is just that — it is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of all Metaverse related research within IEEE, but we do welcome comments and suggestions for the inclusion of important articles or conference contributions that we may have missed.
If there is a particular category of Metaverse related research that you are an expert in, we welcome opinion pieces, literature reviews and other Metaverse related articles. Kindly email directly to the editor to discuss or submit your article for consideration and possible inclusion in our next issue: [email protected].
