Blockchain Papers

Jinkyung Lee, Ki Han Kwon

Due to the endless epidemic, the world has moved to the metaverse world. To keep pace with the changes in the cosmetic market, research on customer experience using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) was conducted. This review study is an empirical analysis that focuses on introducing the safety of the metaverse world into cosmetics in the absence of customer experience in the cosmetic market due to the rapid transition to a non-face-to-face society in the COVID-19 pandemic. This review of consumer experience is a critical literature review. In this study, a technical review approach was used. Using the PRISMA flow chart, a total of 453 references were selected using representative journal search sites such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, RISS, and ResearchGate. Accordingly, a total of 28 papers were selected in the final stage from 2013 to 2022. This literature review focuses on the NFT cosmetics market, which expands the consumer experience into a fun experience by focusing on the sustainable safety of new consumer changes in the metaverse beauty market. This is an empirical analysis focused on the cosmetic consumer experience for the new launch of cosmetic brands using NFTs in the future beauty and cosmetology market. This narrative review article focuses on sustainable and safe experiences for beauty and cosmetics consumer experiences in the post-COVID-19 metaverse, NFTs in the metaverse, FUN for the MZ generation, and new consumer experiences. NFTs, which are a leading novel cultural and social phenomenon and utilize fun raffles in the sustainable and safe metaverse of the MZ generation that embodies the digital world, are a new era in the beauty market. Accordingly, by confirming the change, they are expected to be used as an important marketing material and strategy in the global metaverse cosmetological market for sustainable and safe spaces and consumer experiences.

Ryan Scheiding

The “metaverse” and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), though not necessarily “new” terms or technologies, have risen to mainstream prominence post-2020. This paper, based on survey data obtained from Unity Technologies, examines the metaverse, NFTs, and the future of development within the Unity engine from the perspective of current Unity users. Specifically, the paper examines how users define the metaverse, their goals in metaverse and NFT development, and their future questions and concerns concerning these concepts. This data is then used to place the metaverse and NFTs into broader historical, present, and future contexts. The paper ultimately argues: (1) the metaverse and NFTs follow previous historical trends in communication technology development, (2) development within Unity will continue to be split between game development and non-game development, and (3) arguments of the “newness,” “uniqueness,” or “future-facing” of the metaverse and NFTs help to obfuscate legitimate concerns about these technologies.

Zihui Chen, Yuanyuan Guo, Zihui Wang

Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a relatively new concept that has been a hot topic in the development of the field. The artwork generated in the form of NFT has made it an increasingly lucrative market, while there is also a lot of interest in the application of NFT to games, the metaverse and the financial economy. Therefore, this research paper will investigate the market development trend of NFT in the context of metaverse and the future outlook, especially to make a more detailed analysis of several important fields, taking art and branding industry as examples. Based on case studies and data analysis, NFT’s high pricing is attributed to a variety of factors, where the company's marketing approach is mostly creative and cross-pollinated to appeal to a wide audience. NFT has the ability to grow in the cultural sector as a whole, but it is challenging to sustain long-term prosperity due to the lack of NFT artworks and the likelihood of excessive speculation. Overall, this paper explores the value and potential of NFT using current research and accurate statistics, particularly in the areas of branding and the arts. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of NFT's market prospect and its own value realization.

Sarah Barrington, Nick Merrill

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), digital certificates of ownership for virtual art, have until recently been traded on a highly lucrative and speculative market. Yet, an emergence of misconceptions, along with a sustained market downtime, are calling the value of NFTs into question. This project (1) describes three properties that any valuable NFT should possess (permanence, immutability and uniqueness), (2) creates a quantitative summary of permanence as an initial criteria, and (3) tests our measures on 6 months of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, finding 45% of ERC721 tokens in our corpus do not satisfy this initial criteria. Our work could help buyers and marketplaces identify and warn users against purchasing NFTs that may be overvalued.

S K Manushri, J Santhiya, A E Roobasri, Keshav Shanmukhanathan E · 5 authors

Since the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, cyberspace has kept evolving. In addition to social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (like VR Chat), augmented reality software (like Pokemon Go), and non-fungible token games, we have also developed other computer-mediated virtual environments (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have brought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `Metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalyzed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. Technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. Enabling technologies that drive this transition rigorously are 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. User-centric factors are Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy and Trust and Accountability.

Shenghui Cheng, Yue Zhang, Xiaofei Li, Lin Yang · 6 authors

Truth must be told, but not much—a hybrid society of real and virtual is coming. Metaverse,1Cheng S.H. Metaverse: Concepts, Technologies and Ecology. China Machine Press, 2022Google Scholar rise recently, is attracting significant attention from academia to industry. A metaverse is a network of three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds focused on social connection. Bearing the outbreak of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, people are physically isolated, which triggered the growth of the metaverse. Different from existing work, this commentary targets the roadmap of the metaverse from an artificial intelligence (AI) perspective. First, we blueprint a roadmap for this digital cyberspace transformation, including immersion creation, hardware support, text interpretation, audio processing, connection construction, economy operation, and security protection. Second, at each phase of the roadmap, we address the status as well as the advanced technologies to provide in-depth views accordingly. The whole pipeline is illustrated from an AI2Xu Y.J. Liu X. Cao X. et al.Artificial intelligence: a powerful paradigm for scientific research.Innovation. 2021; 2: 100179Scopus (114) Google Scholar perspective, as shown in Figure 1, and we believe that AI is playing an increasingly important role in core techniques toward this technological singularity. Immersion creation refers to the technique that provides human beings with immersive feelings by constructing a 3D virtual world. Inspired by computer vision, graphics, and visualization techniques, immersion creation includes generating virtual scenes in the metaverse and displaying them to end users. AI has revolutionized these techniques recently. For instance, the scene generation process has been significantly speeded up to nearly real time. However, the scenes generated by these computer-vision-based methodologies are limited by the pre-defined elements used in AI algorithms, which would preclude the immersive feeling of human interaction with a digital human in the metaverse since these elements are different from the real ones, but we desire both parties to share the same scene and thus the same feeling of the environment. This brings challenges in sensing, sampling, and scene generation in the metaverse. One solution is to capture real scenes and use those images or videos to generate new ones and update the scenes in the metaverse with a short period of time, possibly in real time eventually. To this end, computational imaging has provided a promising solution to capture scenes efficiently in a low-cost, low-bandwidth manner;3Altmann Y. McLaughlin S. Padgett M.J. Goyal V.K. Hero A.O. Faccio D. Quantum-inspired computational imaging.Science. 2018; 361: 6403https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat2298Crossref Scopus (119) Google Scholar along with AI, computational imaging may develop rapidly in metaverse-related applications in the future to provide a higher sense of immersion. Hardware denotes the end-user devices, such as the brain-computer interface, robotics, and virtual reality or augmented reality headsets as well as glass-free 3D devices, which determine the quality of the user’s immersive experience. These devices have been revolutionized many times in history;4Lee L.K. Braud T. Zhou P.Y. et al.All one needs to know about metaverse: a complete survey on technological singularity, virtual ecosystem, and research agenda.arXiv. 2021; (Preprint at)https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2110.05352Crossref Google Scholar taking the AR headset as an example, it was designed from macro- to micro-optics and now is heading toward nano-optics, and the size has been reduced dramatically. However, one main challenge is the design of large-scale diffractive devices used in glasses, and AI is now helping with and speeding up the design in a number of ways, from accelerating the iterations to proposing new solutions. The AI accelerator, such as neural-inspired AI chips, designed to accelerate AI and its applications, is growing tremendously now and will evolve to task-specific chips to be used in the metaverse. We believe this is a trend in optical or other devices’ design and is not limited to the metaverse. Text interpretation regards to text generation and text for communication purpose. The metaverse brings convenience for recording activities in business and social life, which potentially facilitates the role of natural language processing,5Zhang Y. Teng Z.Y. Natural Language Processing: A Machine Learning Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2021Crossref Google Scholar a research domain widely supported by AI. Most natural language processing applications in the metaverse focus on personal assistance and business meeting analysis: from the personal side, new dialogue systems could benefit book-keeping of social activities, enabling a personal assistant to give clear instructions, and from a business perspective, it keeps track of meeting minutes, where AI algorithms generate summaries and answer questions concerning specific details. However, in a hybrid society, how to communicate with people of different backgrounds even living in different eras could be an interesting AI-powered application. Audio processing aims for the rendering of auditory immersion. Voice is considered one important interface for humans to enter the metaverse, and it is also the main interaction model between entities (avatars, digital humans, or even non-human objects) in the metaverse. Voice processing consists of two major tasks: automatic speech recognition and text to speech (or speech synthesis), which transforms voice signals to text, or vice versa. Together with the language-understanding techniques, automatic speech recognition and text to speech enable entities in the metaverse to understand the message and intention of others and to speak as if they were in the real world. In addition, audio signals could be rendered as binaural signals, from which humans can sense the location of the sound source and the presence of an enclosed space; in other words, to have the sense of auditory immersion. For auditory immersion in the metaverse, many challenges need to be further overcome, such as separating metaverse sound from real-world sound, customized speech synthesis, complex 3D soundscape generation, etc., which highly rely on advanced signal-processing and machine-learning techniques. Sound is ubiquitous in the metaverse, and we believe that AI is playing a leading role in audio management in the metaverse. Connection construction in the metaverse includes network connection and social construction to get connected with others. Network connections require high-speed network to transfer massive amounts of data, accounting for the obstacles in latency, bandwidth, and consistency. AI overcomes the obstacles in various aspects including traffic planning, routing and classification, congestion control, quality of service, and quality of experience management. After being networked, the society emerges but faces challenges like behavior communication or community management. AI is capable of optimizing social group management by matching people with their desired communities so that the whole society will be divided spiritually rather than physically. As the core purpose of the connection, social activity is a requisite of some recognition techniques, such as face recognition for meeting people and gesture recognition for behavior interaction, as well as pose tracking, texture restoration, and blur correction—all of which are common cases where AI excels. Economy operation is for exchanging virtual goods through a blockchain digital system. With the exponential growth of virtual economy, some challenges have arisen, like large-scale asset management and fraudulent-transaction detection. AI empowers the virtual economy by generating and managing digital assets, monitoring transactions among huge databases, and more. New classifiers and mechanisms supported by AI verify the authenticity of transactions via a decentralized blockchain infrastructure to improve security posture. AI-generated non-fungible tokens and AI-assisted asset tagging increase the efficiency of asset generation and management. In the future, AI can build a more reliable technology-based virtual economy system. Security protection corresponding to the security framework and privacy protection becomes extremely challenging when tremendous virtual devices are connected. This connection is not that reliable and gives space to get attacked, e.g., identity theft and spying, which are common problems that security faces. To be protected, the security system has to require frequent authentications when accessing the service related to virtual devices, which results in time-consuming and other problems. New mechanisms are demanding for authentication with alternative modalities, such as biometric authentication driven by muscle movements or eye gazes, as well as seamless authentication. None of these would happen without AI. Moreover, countless activities and interactions are recorded, creating a crisis of personal privacy. AI is capable of privacy protection through algorithms that automatically and dynamically detect user privacy preferences from diverse contexts in the metaverse. An AI-powered security system will emerge in the metaverse. Besides, other techniques like robotics, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and decision-making are also important components for the metaverse. Likewise, AI also contributes significantly to them—for example, with the help of reinforcement learning, decision-making demonstrates great potential since it enables AI to make decisions through huge amounts of data with various factors and has now become a new trend. AI not only advances the above technologies but is itself evolving rapidly. Current components such as immersion creation and hardware techniques are not really “intelligent” by themselves but are composed “sensing/sampling + AI algorithms” to claim to be intelligent. Looking forward, the next step of AI in the metaverse should move from “make the hardware intelligent by AI algorithms” to “build intelligent hardware by AI algorithms,” where the latter is a hybrid mode and focuses on end-to-end solutions. In this solution, other important techniques in AI such as reinforcement learning, federated learning, and few-shot learning will probably lead to new revolutions. A new era driven by AI is emerging. The digital human produced by AI will increase dramatically, and a digital second life is appearing—a society combined with real and digital humans is launching. It is likely that other species or organisms will be reborn and that a “creator-verse” will turn up. Immortal technology—living forever—will eventually become true. At the current stage, it is more from the inorganic side where everything is generated with digital computers; however, the society will continue, and people will eventually reach the third-verse or even the multi-verse, where the organic world and the inorganic world may merge. AI will speed up this revolution. We would like to thank the support from the Research Center for Industries of the Future (RCIF) at Westlake University, Westlake Fundation (2021B1501-2) and the funding from Lochn Optics. The authors declare no competing interests.

Sadia Suhail Usmani, Medha Sharath, Meghana Mehendale

The metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were some of the hottest tech terms in 2021, according to a Google Trends search. Our review aims to describe the metaverse and NFTs in the context of their potential application in the treatment of mental health disorders. Advancements in technology have been changing human lives at an ever-increasing pace. Metaverse, also known as the three-dimensional (3D) internet, is the convergence of virtual reality (VR) and physical reality in a digital space. It could potentially change the internet as we know it, with NFTs as the key building blocks in the new expansive virtual ecosystem. This immersive 3D virtual world boasts the features of the real world with the added ability to change the surrounding environment according to individual needs and requirements. VR, augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) have been employed as tools in the treatment of various mental health disorders for the past decade. Studies have reported positive results on their effectiveness in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. VR/AR/MR have been hailed as a solution to the acute shortage of mental health professionals and the lack of access to mental healthcare. But, on the flip side, young adults tend to spend a significant amount of time playing 3D immersive games and using social media, which can lead to insecurity, anxiety, depression, and behavioural addiction. Additionally, endless scrolling through social media platforms negatively affects individuals' attention span as well as aggravating the symptoms of adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. We aimed to explore the ramifications of expanding applications of the metaverse on mental health. So far, no other review has explored the future of mental health in the context of the metaverse.

Jane Thomason

Rapid advancements in technology and computing power, combined with the convergence of Blockchain, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, extended reality, gamification, and decentralized finance, have led to recent growth in interest in the metaverse. Indeed today, there are more than 160 metaverse projects, and Citi estimates it could be a 13 trillion USD industry by 2030. While many have not yet grasped the relevance of the metaverse for industries, the opportunity to leverage the metaverse for health and wellness is substantial. In obesity and non-communicable disease (NCDs), there is potential to deploy the metaverse using gamification and incentives, as well as for education and care. This perspective article explores how the metaverse could be used to prevent and manage obesity and NCDs.

Nurten DÖNMEZ

Web3, DLT ve NFT gibi merkezi olmayan teknolojilerin yanı sıra AR/VR gibi deneyimsel teknolojiler hizmetler sektörüne bambaşka bir boyut getirmektedir. Teknolojinin getirdiği yeni yaklaşımlarla bankacılık önce geleneksel bankacılıktan dijital bankacılığa, sonrasında açık ve açık ötesi bankacılığa evrilmiştir. Blokzincir teknolojisiyle merkeziyetsiz finansla tanışan bankacılık sektörünün şimdilerde ise metaverse bankacılığına evrildiğine tanık olmaktayız. Hızlı teknolojik değişim yeni bir temel oluşturduğundan, diğer tüm sektörler gibi finansal hizmetler sektörü de bu duruma uyum sağlamalı ve fırsatları değerlendirmelidir. Müşteri beklentileri sürekli farklılaştığından bankaların müşterilerinin değişen ihtiyaçlarını keşfetmenin yollarını bularak nasıl karşılayacaklarına dair yöntemleri de geliştirmeleri gerekmektedir. Önümüzdeki 10 yıllık dönemde 8 trilyon USD’lık küresel bir pazar oluşturacağı öngörülen metaverse konusu bankacılık sektörünü yakından ilgilendirmektedir. Bankalar, teknolojinin yardımıyla gelişen pazarlama anlayışlarıyla, farklılaşan müşteri beklentilerine hitap etmeye çalışmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı Metaverse yolunda bankacılıktaki pazarlamanın bağlamsal pazarlama ve artırılmış pazarlama açısından incelenerek ve metaverse bankacılığı alanına ilişkin kavramsal bilgi sunulmasıdır. Aynı zamanda bu çalışmada, dünyada son dönemde bankacılık alanında deneyimsel pazarlama ve artırılmış gerçeklik veya metaverse ile ilgili adımlar atan bankalardan örnekler derlenerek bankaların farklılaşan müşteri beklentileri ve bu beklentilere yönelik ürettikleri çözümler yorumlanmıştır.

David Lee Kuo Chuen, Lo Swee Won

In this essay, we innovatively put forward the idea of “NFT-ing the NFT.” A standard on “divisible NFTs” will allow hundreds of millions of future metaverse inhabitants to share ownership and collectively be the user and creator of metaverse items. The first idea of “NFT-ing the NFT” is to NFT non-fungible tokens with a single, consistent representation. These NFTs include music, movies, virtual real estate, club membership, and so on. For example, a song’s NFT can be divided into 25 NFTs, allowing 25 buyers to own the piece jointly. For an NFT representing virtual real estate, separating a 100 sqm NFT land into ten 10 sqm of NFT lands enables more residents to own a piece of land. It promotes land transfers, which are conducive to the overall metaverse economy.

Anqi Wang, Ze Gao, Lik‐Hang Lee, Tristan Braud · 5 authors

User Interaction for NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) is gaining increasing attention. Although NFTs have been traditionally single-use and monolithic, recent applications aim to connect multimodal interaction with human behavior. This paper reviews the related technological approaches and business practices in NFT art. We highlight that multimodal interaction is a currently under-studied issue in mainstream NFT art, and conjecture that multimodal interaction is a crucial enabler for decentralization in the NFT community. We present a continuum theory and propose a framework combining a bottom-up approach with AI multimodal process. Through this framework, we put forward integrating human behavior data into generative NFT units, as "multimodal interactive NFT." Our work displays the possibilities of NFTs in the art world, beyond the traditional 2D and 3D static content.

Mehmet Emin Kahraman

The idea of living in different worlds, starting with cinema, can be seen as the beginning of the virtual world. Because, although limited for a certain period of time, cinema and television, which disconnected the audience from the real world, allowed them to get away from real life and imagine different lives. Later, with the invention of the internet, the power of the computer increased and virtual life continued to be offered to users through websites and games. With the nickname feature, users are able to take their place in the v,rtual world with different identities other than their own has also started. This understanding formed the basis of the understanding of avatars. Especially with computer games, the use of avatars has increased as each user starts to create their own avatar in the virtual world. Big data was created by archiving personal data with social media, and cryptocurrencies and deepfake applications developed by making virtual life more professional with virtual reality/augmented reality were offered to users. In the research, the development of this whole process and the positive and negative effects of Metaverse, which companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Epic, Roblox, Nvidia, Unity Software, continue to design rapidly, on people and real life are emphasized.

Dongying Wei

The traditional tourism industry is facing severe challenges and it urgently needs digital technology to improve the quality of service experience and storage security. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, brings new opportunities to the tourism industry as it provides a trusted platform for travel companies and tourists. This paper aims to address the challenges and for a real-world prototype development, it has proposed Gemiverse, a blockchain-based professional certification and travel platform that offers specialized solutions to meet challenges and focuses on building immersive experiences. Finally, three development stages of Gemiverse and conduct scene application tests is proposed.

Safari Kasiyanto, Mustafa R. Kılınç

The metaverse gained its momentum after a CEO of the biggest social media made a statement that it would be the next big thing after the Internet. Although there is no single, agreed definition of the metaverse, the common understanding of the metaverse is that the concept combines IoT, AR, VR, XR, and 3D technologies. It is also called the Web 3.0. The market capital and the economic potential of the metaverse are enormous. The market cap was calculated around USD14.8 trillion in October 2021 while the economic potential ranged from USD3,75 trillion to USD12.5 trillion. Hence, it is of importance to discuss the legal aspects of the metaverse. This article is the first to elaborate the legal conundrums of the metaverse in a more proper manner. It includes discussion on the property law and intellectual property law, and whether the time has come to have “a virtual property law”. It also discusses some other legal aspects such as privacy and data protection, contract law and smart contracts, cybersecurity and cyberattacks, monetary and payment systems laws, and regulation of virtual assets (including securities and commodities laws), tax law, anti-money laundering and KYC, and criminal law. To give a more comprehensive view, some governance and ethical issues of the metaverse are also touched upon.

Thien Huynh‐The, Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Weizheng Wang, Gokul Yenduri · 8 authors

Since Facebook officially changed its name to Metaverse in Oct. 2021, the metaverse has become a new norm of social networks and three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds. The metaverse aims to bring 3D immersive and personalized experiences to users by leveraging many pertinent technologies. Despite great attention and benefits, a natural question in the metaverse is how to secure its users' digital content and data. In this regard, blockchain is a promising solution owing to its distinct features of decentralization, immutability, and transparency. To better understand the role of blockchain in the metaverse, we aim to provide an extensive survey on the applications of blockchain for the metaverse. We first present a preliminary to blockchain and the metaverse and highlight the motivations behind the use of blockchain for the metaverse. Next, we extensively discuss blockchain-based methods for the metaverse from technical perspectives, such as data acquisition, data storage, data sharing, data interoperability, and data privacy preservation. For each perspective, we first discuss the technical challenges of the metaverse and then highlight how blockchain can help. Moreover, we investigate the impact of blockchain on key-enabling technologies in the metaverse, including Internet-of-Things, digital twins, multi-sensory and immersive applications, artificial intelligence, and big data. We also present some major projects to showcase the role of blockchain in metaverse applications and services. Finally, we present some promising directions to drive further research innovations and developments towards the use of blockchain in the metaverse in the future.

İbrahim YILMAZ

Metaverse is an indicator of interactions in the virtual world with the support of the internet, software, and hardware to create an immersive user experience. In simple terms, the metaverse is the virtual universe that brings the virtual and physical worlds together in a three-dimensional space and allows users to discover a different internet experience. With the innovation it brought to the internet world, it is often referred to as web 3.0. NFT stands for immutable token. It is usually created using the same type of program as cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The term metaverse is now used everywhere and it takes an important place in our lives by developing in different areas. Visual design plays an important role in many areas such as the creation of NFT artwork, games, film, and television. At the same time, it creates a three-dimensional world where avatars representing real people live and digital versions can interact in a digital environment. This article researched problems between what is the metaverse and NFT? What are the main features of Metaverse? What does crypto art involve? seeks answers to questions such as Its general purpose is to make a descriptive literature content analysis of the concepts of the metaverse and NFT in the internet database in a general framework, and finally, to examine how crypto art plays a role in today's world together with technology with examples.

Huakun Huang, Xiangbin Zeng, Lingjun Zhao, Chen Qiu · 6 authors

Metaverse and blockchain, as the latest buzzwords, have attracted great attention from industry and academia. They will inevitably promote technological innovation in the field of building information modeling (BIM) in the future. BIM organizes various building information into a whole by establishing a virtual three-dimensional model of architectural engineering using digital technology. The metaverse seamlessly integrates the real world and the virtual world, and conducts rich activities such as creation, display, and trading. Therefore, through the exploration of the metaverse, it will be possible to build an exciting digital world and transform the physical world better. Meanwhile, introducing the blockchain technology could ensure the fairness and security of resource transactions, data storage, and other activities. In this survey, we delve into the metaverse and blockchain empowerment by studying BIM components, metaverse applications in virtual world construction, and the latest research on blockchain. We also discuss how BIM technology and blockchain can be integrated with metaverse. The collaborations between academia and industry would be certainly required for further development and interdisciplinary research on the metaverse and the integration of blockchain into BIM. We hope to see our survey help researchers, engineers and educators build an open, fair and rational future BIM ecosystem.

Voraprapa Nakavachara, Kanis Saengchote

The Sandbox metaverse LAND non-fungible token (NFT) prices increased by than 300 times (in USD) between December 2019 and January 2022, but when measured in its native utility token (SAND), the increase is only 3 times. Depending on how prices are denominated, investment returns and effective transaction prices vary. We analyze more than 71,000 transactions and find that users are willing to pay 3-4% more when transactions are settled in SAND, and 30% less when settled in wETH (a smart contract version of ETH) when compared to ETH, so unit of account matters. Our results contribute to the discussions of blockchain-based, virtual economy management and the digitalization of money (Brunnermeier et al., 2019).

David Vidal-Tomás

No abstract is available for this record.

Dan Zhang, Simon Chadwick, Lingling Liu

No abstract is available for this record.

Qinglin Yang, Yetong Zhao, Huawei Huang, Zehui Xiong · 6 authors

Metaverse as the latest buzzword has attracted great attention from both industry and academia. Metaverse seamlessly integrates the real world with the virtual world and allows avatars to carry out rich activities including creation, display, entertainment, social networking, and trading. Thus, it is promising to build an exciting digital world and to transform a better physical world through the exploration of the metaverse. In this survey, we dive into the metaverse by discussing how Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) fuse with it through investigating the state-of-the-art studies across the metaverse components, digital currencies, AI applications in the virtual world, and blockchain-empowered technologies. Further exploitation and interdisciplinary research on the fusion of AI and Blockchain towards metaverse will definitely require collaboration from both academia and industries. We wish that our survey can help researchers, engineers, and educators build an open, fair, and rational future metaverse.

Sina Osivand

Metaverse is an immersive 3D virtual environment, a true virtual artificial community in which avatars act as the user's alter ego and interact with each other. If we do not manage the hype for the metaverse, which has recently been receiving a surge in interest, the metaverse will fail to cross the chasm. This article conducts a comprehensive survey on computational arts, in which seven critical topics are relevant to the metaverse, describing novel artworks in blended virtual-physical realities. The topics first cover the building elements for the metaverse, e.g. Virtual scenes and characters, auditory, textual elements. Next, several remarkable types of novel creations in the expanded horizons of metaverse cyberspace have been reflected, such as immersive arts, robotic arts, and other user-centric approaches fuelling contemporary creative outputs.

Ruba Alkadi, Abdulhadi Shoufan

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining immense attention due to their potential to revolutionize various businesses and industries. However, the adoption of UAV-assisted applications will strongly rely on the provision of reliable systems that allow managing UAV operations at high levels of safety and security. Recently, the concept of UAV traffic management (UTM) has been introduced to support safe, efficient, and fair access to low-altitude airspace for commercial UAVs. A UTM system identifies multiple cooperating parties with different roles and levels of authority to provide real-time services to airspace users. However, current UTM systems are centralized and lack a clear definition of protocols that govern a secure interaction between authorities, service providers, and end-users. The lack of such protocols renders the UTM system unscalable and prone to various cyber attacks. Another limitation of the currently proposed UTM architecture is the absence of an efficient mechanism to enforce airspace rules and regulations. To address this issue, we propose a decentralized UTM protocol that controls access to airspace while ensuring high levels of integrity, availability, and confidentiality of airspace operations. To achieve this, we exploit key features of the blockchain and smart contract technologies. In addition, we employ a mobile crowdsensing (MCS) mechanism to seamlessly enforce airspace rules and regulations that govern the UAV operations. The solution is implemented on top of the Etheruem platform and verified using four different smart contract verification tools. We also provided a security and cost analysis of our solution. For reproducibility, we made our implementation publicly available on Github.

Lik‐Hang Lee, Tristan Braud, Pengyuan Zhou, Lin Wang · 9 authors

Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. This 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'. First, technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. We thus examine eight enabling technologies rigorously - Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, 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, we propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.