What Is the Metaverse?
By Nathaniel Bridges, Air Force Research Laboratory; and Peter Corcoran, University of Galway
IEEE Metaverse Newsletter, 2024
The metaverse is defined as a synthetic virtual environment that’s still grounded or parallel to the real world. It provides a three-dimensional experience, allowing you to “explore” a virtual landscape with the help of virtual reality (VR) headsets or augmented reality (AR) goggles.
Simply put, it’s a digital world that’s full of possibilities—a new frontier focused on virtual experiences, where anything you can imagine can be realized. In the metaverse, you can do so much more than just exploring. You’re free to create different environments and even transact using digital assets or currencies.
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has covered the metaverse extensively, attempts to define the metaverse as an interoperable network of 3D worlds with a massive scale that’s rendered in real time. These virtual worlds can be “experienced synchronously and persistently” by an unlimited number of users who have an “individual sense of presence”. He notes that the metaverse—a network of interconnected and interoperable experiences—is often misdescribed as virtual reality and argues that VR is only a small part of the metaverse. The former is used to access or experience the latter.
You might be surprised to find that the metaverse isn’t an entirely new concept. The term itself was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, which, after 29 years, is now considered a “cyberpunk classic”. The book features a dystopian world, complete with virtual reality, smartphones, and wireless internet, where people explore an online world using their avatars. By wearing goggles and earphones, they can access the metaverse, an online world far removed from their own, to escape their dystopian world.
As we increasingly shift our activities online, and consequently, into virtual worlds, we’re taking baby steps into this new world. New and emerging tech lean toward cultivating this digital environment, with hardware and programs connecting us to virtual, augmented, and mixed realities, allowing both physical and virtual worlds to integrate.
It’s predicted that the extended reality (XR) market size will reach $345.9 billion by 2030. XR is an umbrella term that encapsulates immersive technology, including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. Devices under XR include cameras, microphones, and sensors, all of which are used to create a simulated environment while allowing you to still interact with reality. The growing popularity of XR is one factor that will continue to shape the metaverse.
If you’ve ever played video games like Roblox or Fortnite, then you’ve created your own virtual environment and explored a world populated by avatars. If you’ve dipped your toes into NFTs and cryptocurrencies, you’ve already had a sampling of a small part of the metaverse and how it works to some extent.
Metaverse Beyond the Hype
Metaverse Beyond the Hype (PDF, 4 MB), our first article seeks to provide multidisciplinary perspectives on the emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy in the Metaverse. This is a very detailed article that takes a “beyond the hype” perspective offering valuable insight to the benefits and the challenges arising from a broader adoption of metaverse technology across business and society.
The further academic analysis of how business can operate within the virtual world is vital but needs to be balanced by additional research on the many ethical, behavioral and negative impacts on vulnerable users. The proposed research agenda details an extensive set of avenues for further academic analysis of the many and varied aspects of the metaverse and its impact at a societal level. Definitely an article that takes the reader under the bonnet of the Metaverse.
From Universe to Metaverse — A Leap Into Virtual Collaboration
From Universe to Metaverse – A Leap Into Virtual Collaboration (PDF, 9 MB), our second recommended article dates from the pandemic when a group of researchers at the Joint Physics Laboratory of NASA decided to explore how a range of technologies could be used to build a collaborative framework for their work during lockdown. This article provides a candid review of the technical and policy elements that were explored as part of the Welcome to Our Metaverse experiment, the results that were observed, and the key takeaways and lessons learned for further exploration and technology adoption.
The authors started by considering the user experience needs and conducting an initial investigation into a variety of metaverse applications. They next concentrated on several focused case studies, developing initial prototypes for more detailed evaluation, finally presenting a discussion on lessons learned, identified use cases, and a general outlook for the metaverse. They conclude that while metaverse technologies have advanced to the point to be able to bring significant value-add to the organization, significant barriers still exist, causing the adoption cost of the technology to remain high in many cases. Nevertheless, it is expected that as software and hardware mature in the coming months, technology adoption will continue to increase, bringing us closer to fully realizing the metaverse at scale. This article is particularly useful as it provides some excellent practical evaluations of the state of metaverse technologies and how to leverage them in a technical work environment.
All One Needs to Know About Metaverse
All One Needs to Know About Metaverse (PDF, 21 MB), our third article provides a complete survey on the technological singularity, virtual ecosystems, and research agendas relating to the Metaverse. This ambitious survey paper presents the first effort to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, and illustrates the possibility of the digital ‘big bang’. The authors examine eight enabling technologies rigorously – Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, IoT and Robotics, Edge and Cloud computing, and Future Mobile Networks. In terms of applications, the metaverse ecosystem allows human users to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent, and shared realm. Therefore, we discuss six user-centric factors – Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy, and Trust and Accountability. Finally, they propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.
This survey offers another very comprehensive analysis of the Metaverse and compliments our other recommended articles.
A Metaverse Taxonomy Beyond the Metaverse: XV (eXtended meta/uni/Verse)
A Metaverse Taxonomy (PDF, 7 MB), our fourth article seeks to better define the Metaverse in terms of its components, applications and open challenges. The authors posit that the integration of enhanced social activities and neural-net methods requires a new definition of Metaverse suitable for the present, different from the previous Metaverse. This paper divides the concepts and essential techniques necessary for realizing the Metaverse into three components (i.e., hardware, software, and contents) and three approaches (i.e., user interaction, implementation, and application). They then link these techniques to Metaverse’s representative embodiments, Ready Player One, Roblox, and Facebook research, in the domain of films, games,and studies. In this regard they highlight the central importance of providing interaction with and an ability to shape the story within the Metaverse.
As with our other recommended articles this one provides a range of new insights and perspectives on the emergent Metaverse.
Beyond the Metaverse: XV (eXtended meta/uni/Verse)
Beyond the Metaverse: XV (eXtended meta/uni/Verse) (PDF, 8 MB), our last recommended read takes us beyond the boundaries of the conventional Metaverse into the eXtended meta/uni/Verse (XV). It is a fitting final article that encourages us to think critically about our current ideas of the Metaverse and understand that ultimately the power of the Metaverse comes from its seamless integration with the physical world around us. In their conclusion the authors identify five grand challenges for XV: (1) Standards; (2) Human factors and perceptual effects; (3) Reliability; (4) Storage and Transmission; and (5) Ethics and in particular, Body, Ownership, and Control. Another thought-provoking article that is well work a read.
The Metaverse—No Longer the Stuff of Science Fiction
We’re inching our way toward the future and many of the things and concepts we previously thought were only limited to sci-fi and fantasy novels are now slowly being brought to life with continuous innovation in different fields.
As the metaverse continues to develop, we’re seeing a glimpse of a richer, more borderless world that’s full of promise. However, while this new world continues to expand, we have to be aware of the set of challenges it brings with every new development. To make this new world a safer one, we must take into account how we can address these challenges so we can continue to make strides toward progress.
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release: distribution is unlimited. AFRL Cleared 08/21/24; AFRL-2024-4658 Anything attached to links provided throughout this document is not and cannot be cleared by the Air Force and are the sole responsibility of the author.
