The metaverse is primarily the post-reality universe, a persistent and perpetual multiuser environment that combines physical reality with digital virtuality. It relies on the convergence of technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality that enable multisensory interactions with people, digital objects, and virtual environments.
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Thus, the metaverse represents an interconnected social, networked immersive environment web in persistent multi-user platforms, allowing embodied seamless user communication in dynamic and real-time interactions with digital artifacts.
The first iteration of the metaverse was a virtual world web where avatars could teleport among them. However, its contemporary iteration features social, immersive virtual reality platforms compatible with massive augmented reality collaborative spaces and open game worlds.
The metaverse also harnesses many other state-of-the-art technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, blockchain, and robotics, to offer exciting opportunities for exploring novel solutions. The metaverse technology could be applied in different fields, including smart cities, the entertainment and gaming industry, remote offices, education, psychotherapy, digital exhibitions, tourism, and sightseeing.
The Metaverse Technology: Overview
The metaverse technology is powered by key hardware components such as head-mounted displays, hand-based input devices, non-hand-based input devices, and motion input devices. These are complemented by key software components like scene and object recognition, sound and speech recognition, scene and object generation, sound and speech synthesis, and motion rendering, which are crucial for recognition and rendering in the metaverse technology.
The metaverse contains multimodal content representation, multimodal entity linking and expansion, agent persona modeling, scenario generation, population, and evaluation. Metaverse approaches are categorized into user interactions and implementations/technical methods.
Embodied interaction, multi-task interaction, multimodal interaction, and language interaction are the major user interaction approaches, while operation consideration, integration optimization, multi-agent optimization, lifelong learning, reinforcement learning-based approaches, and multimodal inference are the key implementations of the metaverse.
AI techniques such as machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision; internetworking and telecommunication technologies, including fifth-generation (5G) and sixth-generation (6G) technologies; extended reality; decentralized ledger technologies such as smart contracts and non-fungible tokens; digital twins including process twins, system twins, asset twins, and component twins; and distributed computing such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing, and cloud storage are the primary metaverse enabling technologies.
AI in the Metaverse
Machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing play critical roles in assimilating AI into the metaverse. For instance, the metaverse significantly benefits from machine learning technology, which enables it to learn from earlier exchanges among itself and participants to improve outcomes over time.
This technology also improves the metaverse’s ability to behave in a more human-like manner, reducing the need for human involvement and creating new possibilities for expansion and scalability. By harnessing natural language processing technology, the metaverse provides an effortless user experience through the conversion of natural language into computer-readable formats, which undergo processing and analysis to generate the expected outcome.
Integrating several AI technologies, such as deep learning, neural networks, and natural language processing, could achieve optimal speech recognition accuracy. The metaverse benefits from natural language processing, as it allows avatars to converse using natural-sounding language and enables global user interaction.
AI and the metaverse have been proposed as the metaverse of medical technology and AI (MeTAI), which could facilitate the refinement, regulation, assessment, and growth of AI-based medical practice, with augmented regulatory science, raw data sharing, virtual comparative scanning, and metaverse medical intervention as key elements.
Applications of the Metaverse Technology
In industry, the metaverse could be applied to optimize and plan the manufacturing process of a product life cycle, realize virtual verification design, utilize highly simulated virtual products for market and actual field testing, and solve unstable manufacturing processes and long product trial cycle problems.
In art and culture, metaverse technology could enable the presentation of more exhibits in digital form, extending museum exhibitions to more regions. Additionally, a combination of real and virtual exhibits could be used to display precious collections that cannot be touched up close, enabling diverse interaction methods between collections and people.
Moreover, the metaverse could facilitate the emergence of new cultural forms and cultural creation methods as a new social form of society. The development of interactive technology and improvements in the immersive experience will effectively promote the development of virtual concerts and virtual idols.
The metaverse utilizes digital twin technology as a virtual world parallel to reality, which plays an important role in building smart cities. Digital twin technology digitally maps the physical world, fully capturing urban data like space, objects, vehicles, and people, and forming a manageable, controllable, and visible digital twin city.
It enhances resource utilization efficiency, optimizes urban management and services, and improves citizens’ quality of life. In the entertainment and gaming industry, the development of interactive technologies like the metaverse could significantly improve the sense of immersion in the gameplay, effectively enhancing user experience, enjoyment, and playability.
The metaverse can address the original remote office model’s limitations to improve its functions and create more opportunities for remote work. This can ensure reliable telecommuting, which has gained immense importance during the recent pandemic.
Constructing a metaverse could improve digital exhibition and tourism. The development of interactive and digital twin technologies enables users to overcome the limitations of space and time, visit scenic spots around the world freely, and enjoy an immersive experience.
The rise and development of new industries within the metaverse, decentralization, and blockchain technology could drive economic development effectively. The metaverse could help with psychotherapy by constructing a relaxing and virtual situation and interacting and communicating with virtual characters.
Metaverse will also substantially influence both the education and healthcare sectors. In the medical field, this technology could be used for senior care, vascular system fitness, prolonged and chronic diseases, dentistry, gynecology, oncology, ophthalmology, physical health, and medical education and training.
For instance, the metaverse could play a big role in controlling long-term illnesses, offering social interaction opportunities to senior citizens, and developing tools that facilitate the sharing of information, clinical simulation, and healthcare delivery.
In education, the metaverse helps learners learn invisible parts three-dimensionally and visually through virtual digital information and solve problems effectively. It also helps learners thoroughly understand content that is difficult to explain in text or observe and enables learners to construct knowledge through experience. Thus, the metaverse construction promotes education, specifically preschool education.
New Developments
Coordinated and balanced support from several industries/domains that are indispensable for ensuring economic development, including engineering infrastructure, entertainment, education, and consumption, is essential to expanding economic internal circulation and domestic demand.
Metaverse applications could assist in this task and enable many industries to increase their efficiency and provide an improved user experience. However, metaverse application development requires the support of different AI techniques, such as machine learning, knowledge graph, computer vision, and natural language processing, which is a significant challenge.
Existing metaverse application development lacks a lightweight AI technology framework. In an article submitted to the ArXiv* server, researchers proposed MetaAID, a flexible metaverse AI technology framework that supports semantic and language technologies in virtual human and digital twin development.
Additionally, the metaverse application development process involves both manual editing work and technical development tasks, and the process typically becomes a multi-team heavyweight collaboration project, which is another significant challenge. The proposed framework could summarize common AI techniques and application development templates with common functional interfaces and modules.
Researchers designed five applications for three industries based on this framework to expand domestic demand and economic internal circulation. Results validated that the proposed framework could effectively support AI technologies while developing metaverse applications in various industries.
In conclusion, the metaverse, a fusion of physical and digital realities, holds immense potential across various fields. From gaming and education to healthcare and industry, its applications are vast and transformative. Yet, issues like interaction problems, computation issues, ethical issues, privacy issues, cyber-syndrome, standards and compatibility, software and hardware limitations, and selection of medium must be sorted out to fully exploit this technology.
References and Further Reading
Zhu, H. (2022). MetaAID: A Flexible Framework for Developing Metaverse Applications via AI Technology and Human Editing. ArXiv. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2204.01614, https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01614
Mystakidis, S. (2022). Metaverse. Encyclopedia, 2(1), 486-497. DOI: 10.3390/encyclopedia2010031, https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8392/2/1/31
Wang, H. et al. (2023). A survey on the metaverse: The state-of-the-art, technologies, applications, and challenges. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 10(16), 14671-14688. DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2023.3278329, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10130406
Park, S. M., Kim, Y. G. (2022). A metaverse: Taxonomy, components, applications, and open challenges. IEEE Access, 10, 4209-4251. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3140175, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9667507
Kye, B., Han, N., Kim, E., Park, Y., Jo, S. (2021). Educational applications of metaverse: possibilities and limitations. Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 18. DOI: 10.3352/jeehp.2021.18.32, https://synapse.koreamed.org/articles/1149230
Ullah, H., Manickam, S., Obaidat, M., Laghari, S. U. A., Uddin, M. (2023). Exploring the potential of metaverse technology in healthcare: Applications, challenges, and future directions. IEEE Access, 11, 69686-69707. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3286696, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10153590