Metaverse for Social Good: A University Campus Prototype

Abstract

In recent years, the metaverse has attracted enormous attention from around the world with the development of related technologies. The expected metaverse should be a realistic society with more direct and physical interactions, while the concepts of race, gender, and even physical disability would be weakened, which would be highly beneficial for society. However, the development of metaverse is still in its infancy, with great potential for improvement. Regarding metaverse's huge potential, industry has already come forward with advance preparation, accompanied by feverish investment, but there are few discussions about metaverse in academia to scientifically guide its development. In this paper, we highlight the representative applications for social good. Then we propose a three-layer metaverse architecture from a macro perspective, containing infrastructure, interaction, and ecosystem. Moreover, we journey toward both a historical and novel metaverse with a detailed timeline and table of specific attributes. Lastly, we illustrate our implemented blockchain-driven metaverse prototype of a university campus and discuss the prototype design and insights. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Collaborative and social computing systems and tools; • Software and its engineering → Software system structures.

What is the Metaverse? An Immersive Cyberspace and Open Challenges

“…With the Metaverse being in its infancy, there is no strict definition of how much these technologies should interface with our physical world. This uncertainty will resolutely affect interoperability, as some metaverse applications may be strongly anchored within a physical location [2], while others may be entirely virtual [4], accessible through a traditional desktop computer. A study on developing an AR metaverse campus [2] suggests replicating the physical environment into a fully virtual experience Figure 2: The trend of mobile interfaces is projected to become centric of the user's body and smaller in size, perhaps eventually invisible.…”

Unified Resource Allocation Framework for the Edge Intelligence-Enabled Metaverse

“…The metaverse can be considered to follow a three-layer architecture [4]. Firstly, the physical layer consists of all the hardware to support the operational functions of the metaverse, i.e., computation, communication, and storage.…”

Metaverse's stochastic optimization for enhanced computation and communication

“…The metaverse can be considered to follow a three-layer architecture [31], i.e., physicalvirtual synchronization, the Metaverse engine, and the infrastructure layer as shown in Fig. 2.1.…”

“…Other popular MMORPGs are World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto Online, Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Go, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For a detailed discussion of these games, the reader may refer to [31]. Following the classification framework [31], we present a taxonomy for the above gaming Metaverse according to their features in Table 2.1.…”

“…For a detailed discussion of these games, the reader may refer to [31]. Following the classification framework [31], we present a taxonomy for the above gaming Metaverse according to their features in Table 2.1.…”