Introduction to the Minitrack on Metaverse

Abstract

In 1992, the term "Metaverse" was first introduced by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel "Snow Crash".It is a portmanteau consisting of "meta" (which means "beyond"), to capture the development of a virtual world beyond the physical reality, and "verse" (which refers to a back-formation from "universe") to refer to a virtual utopia.Second Life, a multimedia game, was launched in 2003 and was considered as the most important application of Metaverse (or virtual world) at the time.Despite the great attention that Second Life attracted, the Metaverse did not manage to create a critical mass possibly due to the novelty of the technology at the time and its lack of interoperability with other solutions.Recently, technological advancements in blockchain technology, the evolution of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), technological progress in extended reality (virtual and augmented), developments in other fields like Artificial Intelligence (AI), haptic devices, and the convergence of all the above technologies have revived the interest into the Metaverse.It is expected that a new generation of the Internet will evolve from the Metaverse, built on technologies like extended reality, blockchain, and others.The dynamic of the Metaverse is huge, with many experts predicting that it will generate a multi-trillion market in the coming years.Despite the opportunities and the advantages that the Metaverse may offer, there are many open challenges that need to be addressed, including social, legal, ethical, technical issues.In this first edition of the minitrack, we received 4 interesting articles.Based on reviewers' comments, we finally accepted 2 papers that contribute to a better understanding of the metaverse.In the first paper, Nils Augustin, Khalid Durani, Tim Kollmer and Andreas Eckhardt argue that blockchain technology can help to structure ownership rights in the Metaverse and to resolve tensions between creators and users.Their research explores Decentraland, a blockchain-based Metaverse, through a socio-technical system lens.They find that the use of blockchain technology goes beyond the application of