A Review of Metaverse’s Definitions, Architecture, Applications, Challenges, Issues, Solutions, and Future Trends

Abstract

Metaverse is a vision enabling to constitute an environment in which someone could see real and virtualized worlds. The Metaverse is a product (or something similar as we do not yet know its final form) of such technologies. In this circumstance, when applications that utilize the Metaverse are used, there seem to be no transportation charges, and there is no cap on amounts of individuals, users, players, learners, or trainee who can take part. Hence, and due to such a feature, the Metaverse has attracted various researchers from different fields where it has been exploited by them to contribute to those fields and research areas. As for example, it is possible to teach various target audiences by offering different events and classes from any location in the globe. In order for a participant to utilize the Metaverse, there are necessary conditions to be considered as well as other settings to be initialized. In line of this, virtual reality, augmented reality, availability of required sensors, smart glasses, headsets, and few others are considered some examples of such conditions and settings that the Metaverse requires. Despite the advantages that Metaverse offers us, there are a number of considerations that must be taken into account while developing it by interested researchers. One of these concerns is the Metaverse privacy regarding the participants (represented as avatars inside the Metaverse environment). Another issue is that since the Metaverse is still in its early stages, many attempts have to be made from interested researchers who engage to develop it to enhancing it. This review aims to survey related articles that concern the Metaverse and its development providing a review of the chronological stages throughout the history of the development of Metaverse. It aims also to list a number of recent technological advances allowing the Metaverse. Besides, Metaverse's definitions, properties, and architecture, and applications have been discussed and listed in this review. The novelty of this article is that it has suggested a framework to a number of issues that are still paid attention for potential solutions by researchers aiming to contribute to researchers and designers to consider such an issue and its corresponding solution for future research works and enhancement. Challenges faced by researchers and other relevant concerned issues related to Metaverse have been in detail discussed and highlighted. Besides, future trends have been clarified.

Digitally embodied lifespan neurocognitive development and Tactile Internet: Transdisciplinary challenges and opportunities

“…Through TI technologies and the more recent vision of digitalized immersive 3D realms known as Metaverse (e.g., Al-Ghaili et al, 2022;Mystakidis, 2022;Rostami and Maier, 2022), the embodiments of human perceptual and cognitive processes would frequently be interacting with digitalized multisensory signals including haptics. Such "digital embodiments" raise challenges for digitalizing sensory signals in ways that preserve key stimulus characteristics for humans to sense and perceive, while not overburdening the latency and capacity requirements on the telecommunication networks that transmit these signals (e.g., Steinbach et al, 2018;Noll et al, 2022).…”

“…Another potential interface is collaborative research on the design of plausible multisensory experiences in AR/VR or other mixtures of digital environments as envisioned in Metaverse (e.g., Al-Ghaili et al, 2022). In this regard, neurocognitive mechanisms of contextual expectancy-based multisensory perception presented above (Kang et al, 2022) is a starting point for further studies on foundations for plausible subjective experiences in digitalized environments.…”

Metaverse in the Virtual Workplace

“…At the same time, it is not clear how to define the metaverse as a form of virtual workplace. Researchers have offered definitions of metaverse per se (Al-Ghaili et al, 2022). For example, Bourlakis et al (2009) understand the metaverse as online virtual worlds.…”

“…Kim, 2021; Ng et al, 2021). Despite numerous definitions of metaverse (Al-Ghaili et al, 2022), none have yet addressed metaverse in the workplace. Metaverse has the potential to revolutionize the way we work, collaborate and communicate in virtual environments.…”

Wideband 3-D Printed All-Metal Reflectarray With Notches for Low-Cost Millimeter-Wave Applications

“…N OWADAYS, there is a widespread and increasing interest in metaverse, which uses virtual world and virtual objects for entertainment, education, training, and research applications. To support high wireless transmission rate in metaverse, wide bandwidth is needed [1], [2]. Millimeter wave (mm-wave) band is promising for metaverse applications due to its wide bandwidth and small size of devices.…”