Ayan Sar, Sampurna Roy, Tanupriya Choudhury, Ajith Abraham
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models have dramatically advanced deepfake technology, and its threats to digital security, media integrity, and public trust have increased rapidly. This research explored zero-shot deepfake detection, an emerging method even when the models have never seen a particular deepfake variation. In this work, we studied self-supervised learning, transformer-based zero-shot classifier, generative model fingerprinting, and meta-learning techniques that better adapt to the ever-evolving deepfake threat. In addition, we suggested AI-driven prevention strategies that mitigated the underlying generation pipeline of the deepfakes before they occurred. They consisted of adversarial perturbations for creating deepfake generators, digital watermarking for content authenticity verification, real-time AI monitoring for content creation pipelines, and blockchain-based content verification frameworks. Despite these advancements, zero-shot detection and prevention faced critical challenges such as adversarial attacks, scalability constraints, ethical dilemmas, and the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. These limitations were addressed by discussing future research directions on explainable AI for deepfake detection, multimodal fusion based on image, audio, and text analysis, quantum AI for enhanced security, and federated learning for privacy-preserving deepfake detection. This further highlighted the need for an integrated defense framework for digital authenticity that utilized zero-shot learning in combination with preventive deepfake mechanisms. Finally, we highlighted the important role of interdisciplinary collaboration between AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to create resilient defenses against the rising tide of deepfake attacks.
Protocol art has recently proliferated through blockchain-based smart contracts, building on a century-long lineage of conceptual, participatory, interactive, systematic, algorithmic, and generative art practices. Few studies have examined the characteristics and appreciation of this emerging art form. To address this gap, this paper presents an annotated portfolio analysis of protocol artworks by Pak, a pioneering and influential pseudonymous artist who treats smart contracts as medium and collective participation through protocol as message. Tracing the evolution from early open-edition releases of The Fungible (2021) and the dynamic mechanics of Merge (2021) to the soul-bound messaging of Censored (2022) and the reflective absence of Not Found (2023), we examine how Pak choreographs distributed agency across collectors and autonomous code, demonstrating how programmable protocols become a social fabric in artistic meaning-making. Through thematic analysis of Pak's works, we identify seven core characteristics distinguishing protocol art from other art forms: (1) system-centric rather than object-centric composition, (2) autonomous governance enabling open-ended control, (3) distributed agency and communal authorship, (4) temporal dynamism and lifecycle aesthetics, (5) economy-driven engagement, (6) poetic message embedded in interaction rituals, and (7) interoperability enabling composability for emergent complexity. We then discuss how these features set protocol art apart from adjacent movements such as conceptual, generative, participatory, interactive, and performance art. By analyzing principles grounded in Pak's practice, we contribute to the emerging literature on protocol art (or "protocolism") and offer design implications for future artists exploring this evolving form.
Haopeng Wang, Roberto Martinez-Velazquez, Haiwei Dong, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Metaverse aims to construct a large, unified, immersive, and shared digital realm by combining various technologies, namely XR (extended reality), blockchain, and digital twin, among others. This article explores the Metaverse from the perspective of multimedia communication by conducting and analyzing real-world experiments on four different Metaverse platforms: VR (virtual reality) Vircadia, VR Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, and MR (mixed reality) Virtual City. We first investigate the traffic patterns and network performance in the three VR platforms. After raising the challenges of the Metaverse streaming and investigating the potential methods to enhance Metaverse performance, we propose a remote rendering architecture and verify its advantages through a prototype involving the campus network and MR multimodal interaction by comparison with local rendering.
Petar Radanliev, David De Roure, Peter Novitzky, Ivo Sluganovic
Despite the proliferation of Blockchain Metaverse projects, the inclusion of physically disabled individuals in the Metaverse remains distant, with limited standards and regulations in place. However, the article proposes a concept of the Metaverse that leverages emerging technologies, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things, to enable greater engagement of disabled creatives. This approach aims to enhance inclusiveness in the Metaverse landscape. Based on the findings, the paper concludes that the active involvement of physically disabled individuals in the design and development of Metaverse platforms is crucial for promoting inclusivity. The proposed framework for accessibility and inclusiveness in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed realities of decentralised Metaverses provides a basis for the meaningful participation of disabled creatives. The article emphasises the importance of addressing the mechanisms for art production by individuals with disabilities in the emerging Metaverse landscape. Additionally, it highlights the need for further research and collaboration to establish standards and regulations that facilitate the inclusion of physically disabled individuals in Metaverse projects.
Roberto García, Ana Cediel, Mercè Teixidó, Rosa Gil
Blockchain technologies open new opportunities for media copyright management. To provide an overview of the main initiatives in this blockchain application area, we have first reviewed the existing academic literature. The review shows literature is still scarce and immature in many aspects, which is more evident when comparing it to initiatives coming from the industry. Blockchain has been receiving significant inflows of venture capital and crowdfunding, which have boosted its progress in many fields, including its application to media management. Consequently, we have complemented the review with a business perspective. Existing reports about blockchain and media have been studied and consolidated into four prominent use cases. Moreover, each one has been illustrated through existing businesses already exploring them. Combining the academic and industry perspectives, we provide a more general and complete overview of current trends in media copyright management using blockchain technologies.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that provide unique ownership and authenticity of digital media such as art, music, and collectibles.NFT Marketplace is a blockchain-based platform that enables the creation, trading, and collecting of NFTs.The platform leverages blockchain technology to ensure the authenticity and ownership of NFTs, providing a secure and transparent way to transact digital assets.In this major project report, we explore the NFT Marketplace and its underlying blockchain technology.We provide an overview of the platform's features, including the ability to tokenize any digital asset, create customizable smart contracts, and sell NFTs with low fees and instant trades.We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the platform, including its ease of use, potential for fraud, and scalability challenges.The Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have revolutionized the digital realm, redefining the concept of ownership and trade of unique digital assets.NFTs represent one-of-a-kind tokens, each verifiably and indelibly linked to a specific digital or physical asset, encompassing diverse forms of content, including video, audio, and images.These unique tokens have paved the way for creators to monetize their digital creations while providing collectors with an innovative means to invest, trade, and showcase their multimedia NFT collections.Central to the NFT ecosystem are NFT marketplaces, digital platforms designed to facilitate the creation, sale, and management of NFTs in various multimedia formats.These marketplaces have proliferated, providing creators with the means to mint NFTs, buyers with the opportunity to acquire them, and collectors with platforms to curate and trade their diverse NFT portfolios.We explore the multifaceted world of NFT marketplaces, focusing on their pivotal role in the creation, sale, and management of video, audio, and image NFTs.We analyze the economic implications, including pricing strategies and royalties, while addressing environmental sustainability concerns associated with NFTs.Challenges and opportunities encountered within this dynamic ecosystem are critically examined, including scalability, intellectual property rights, and the emergence of decentralized NFT marketplaces.Through in-depth case studies, we offer insights into the unique features and innovative approaches adopted by leading NFT marketplaces, shedding light on the transformative potential of this digital metaverse.This report serves as a valuable resource for those seeking a comprehensive understanding of NFT marketplaces catering to video, audio, and image NFTs, emphasizing the profound impact these tokens have on the creation, trade, and experience of digital content across various media formats.Navigating this dynamic digital frontier necessitates a nuanced perspective, and our survey aims to provide a holistic view of this rapidly evolving landscape.
The current large blockchain systems (BTC Lightning network, Ethereum, etc.) are generally facing the problems of low persistence rates and high storage costs. Therefore, users tend to store single modal (textual) information on the existing blockchain systems. Inspired by semantic communication algorithms, this paper presents a new algorithm to solve the serious imbalance between textual and visual modals on blockchains. After semantic sampling of the original visual image, the resulting semantic text will be stored on the chain, and the end users can reconstruct a semantically similar image using the \textbf{R}elative \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{I}sotope \textbf{S}election algorithm. Experiments on the DIV2K dataset show that the blockchain with our algorithm can achieve 430,000 times the storage capacity and 550,000 times the persistence rate for the original visual data with acceptable semantic information loss.
Leonhard Balduf, Martin Florian, Björn Scheuermann
We explore issues relating to the storage of digital art, based on an empirical investigation into the storage of audiovisual data referenced by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We identify current trends in NFT data storage and highlight problems with implemented solutions. We particularly focus our investigation on the use of the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS), which emerges as a popular and versatile distributed storage solution for NFTs. Based on the analysis of discovered data storage techniques, we propose a set of best practices to ensure long-term storage survivability of NFT data. While helpful for forming the NFT art market into a legitimate long-term environment for digital art, our recommendations are also directly applicable for improving the availability and integrity of non-NFT digital art.
Open access
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Advanced Data Storage Technologies
Digital and Traditional Archives Management
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Muhammad Asif Khan, Emna Baccour, Zina Chkirbene, Aiman Erbad · 7 authors
5G communication brings substantial improvements in the quality of service provided to various applications by achieving higher throughput and lower latency. However, interactive multimedia applications (e.g., ultra high definition video conferencing, 3D and multiview video streaming, crowd-sourced video streaming, cloud gaming, virtual and augmented reality) are becoming more ambitious with high volume and low latency video streams putting strict demands on the already congested networks. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that extends cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network i.e., at the base station level. To meet the latency requirements and avoid the end-to-end communication with remote cloud data centers, MEC allows to store and process video content (e.g., caching, transcoding, pre-processing) at the base stations. Both video on demand and live video streaming can utilize MEC to improve existing services and develop novel use cases, such as video analytics, and targeted advertisements. MEC is expected to reshape the future of video streaming by providing ultra-reliable and low latency streaming (e.g., in augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles), pervasive computing (e.g., in real-time video analytics), and blockchain-enabled architecture for secure live streaming. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent developments in MEC-enabled video streaming bringing unprecedented improvement to enable novel use cases. A detailed review of the state-of-the-art is presented covering novel caching schemes, optimal computation offloading, cooperative caching and offloading and the use of artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning) in MEC-assisted video streaming services.
Dan Sheridan, James S. Harris, Frank Wear, Jerry Cowell · 6 authors
The inability of a computer to think has been a limiter in its usefulness and a point of reassurance for humanity since the first computers were created. The semantic web is the first step toward removing that barrier, enabling computers to operate based on conceptual understanding, and AI and ML are the second. Both semantic knowledge and the ability to learn are fundamental to web3, as are blockchain, decentralization, transactional transparency, and ownership. Web3 is the next generational step in the information age, where the web evolves into a more digestible medium for users and machines to browse knowledge. The slow introduction of Web3 across the global software ecosystem will impact the people who enable the current iteration. This evolution of the internet space will expand the way knowledge is shared, consumed, and owned, which will lessen the requirement for a global standard and allow data to interact efficiently, no matter the construction of the knowledge. The heart of this paper understands the: 1) Enablement of Web3 across the digital ecosystem. 2) What a Web3 developer will look like. 3) How this alteration will evolve the market around software and knowledge in general.
Roberto Garcı́a, Ana Cediel, Mercè Teixidó, Rosa Gil
Recent initiatives related to the Metaverse focus on better visualization, like augmented or virtual reality, but also persistent digital objects. To guarantee real ownership of these digital objects, open systems based on public blockchains and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are emerging together with a nascent decentralized and open creator economy. To manage this emerging economy in a more organized way, and fight the so common NFT plagiarism, we propose CopyrightLY, a decentralized application for authorship and copyright management. It provides means to claim content authorship, including supporting evidence. Content and metadata are stored in decentralized storage and registered on the blockchain. A token is used to curate these claims, and potential complaints, by staking it on them. Staking is incentivized by the fact that the token is minted using a bonding curve. The tokenomics include the resolution of complaints and enabling the monetization of curated claims. Monetization is achieved through licensing NFTs with metadata enhanced by semantic technologies. Semantic data makes explicit the reuse conditions transferred with the token while keeping the connection to the underlying copyright claims to improve the trustability of the NFTs. Moreover, the semantic metadata is flexible enough to enable licensing not just in the real world. Licenses can refer to reuses in specific locations in a metaverse, thus facilitating the emergence of creative economies in them.
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.
Due to the rising complexity of the metaverse's business logic and the low-latency nature of the metaverse, developers typically encounter the challenge of effectively reading, writing, and retrieving historical on-chain data in order to facilitate their functional implementations at scale. While it is true that accessing blockchain states is simple, more advanced real-world operations such as search, aggregation, and conditional filtering are not available when interacting directly with blockchain networks, particularly when dealing with requirements for on-chain event reflection. We offer Matrix Syncer, the ultimate middleware that bridges the data access gap between blockchains and end-user applications. Matrix Syncer is designed to facilitate the consolidation of on-chain information into a distributed data warehouse while also enabling customized on-chain state transformation for a scalable storage, access, and retrieval. It offers a unified layer for both on- and off-chain state, as well as a fast and flexible atomic query. Matrix Syncer is easily incorporated into any infrastructure to aggregate data from various blockchains concurrently, such as Ethereum and Flow. The system has been deployed to support several metaverse projects with a total value of more than $15 million USD.
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.
In this paper we introduce a scheme for detecting manipulated audio and video. The scheme is a synthesis of blockchains, encrypted spread spectrum watermarks, perceptual hashing and digital signatures, which we call an Embedded Blockchain. Within this scheme, we use the blockchain for its data structure of a cryptographically linked list, cryptographic hashing for absolute comparisons, perceptual hashing for flexible comparisons, digital signatures for proof of ownership, and encrypted spread spectrum watermarking to embed the blockchain into the background noise of the media. So each media recording has its own unique blockchain, with each block holding information describing the media segment. The problem of verifying the integrity of the media is recast to traversing the blockchain, block-by-block, and segment-by-segment of the media. If any chain is broken, the difference in the computed and extracted perceptual hash is used to estimate the level of manipulation.
Rhythm Dungeon is a rhythm game which leverages the blockchain as a shared open database. During the gaming session, the player explores a roguelike dungeon by inputting specific sequences in time to music rhythm. By integrating smart contract to the game program, the enemies through the venture are generated from other games which share the identical blockchain. On the other hand, the player may upload their characters at the end of their journey, so that their own character may appear in other games and make an influence. Rhythm Dungeon is designed and implemented to show the potential of decentralized gaming experience, which utilizes the blockchain to provide asynchronous interactions among massive players.
With the support of the blockchain systems, the cryptocurrency has changed the world of virtual assets. Digital games, especially those with massive multi-player scenarios, will be significantly impacted by this novel technology. However, there are insufficient academic studies on this topic. In this work, we filled the blank by surveying the state-of-the-art blockchain games. We discuss the blockchain integration for games and then categorize existing blockchain games from the aspects of their genres and technical platforms. Moreover, by analyzing the industrial trend with a statistical approach, we envision the future of blockchain games from technological and commercial perspectives.
Blockchain gaming is an emerging entertainment paradigm. However, blockchain games are still suffering from security issues, due to the immature blockchain technologies and its unsophisticated developers. In this work, we analyzed the blockchain game architecture and reveal the possible penetration methods of cracking. We scanned more than 600 commercial blockchain games to summarize a security overview from the perspective of the web server and smart contract, respectively. We also conducted three case studies for blockchain games to show detailed vulnerability detection.