All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda

By Lik-Hang Lee, Tristan Braud, Pengyuan Zhou, Lin Wang, Dianlei Xu, Zijun Lin, Abhishek Kumar, Carlos Bermejo, Pan Hui. Found. Trends Hum. Comput. Interact., 2021

1,092 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, 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. 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.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b00cc531f4872dcff8577fc238f70a088eef3b56

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Citations in the corpus

S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents (2023, background): “Moreover, social simulation can even serve as a substitute for human presence, exemplified by the emergence of digital avatars in the metaverse [19].”
A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy (2022, methodology): “[6] review and examine eight fundamental technologies to build”
“Extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to Predict University Students’ Intentions to Use Metaverse-Based Learning Platforms” (2023, background): “In virtual worlds such as the metaverse, protecting user privacy and ensuring data security is an extremely important matter (Lee et al., 2021).”
Metaverse: Perspectives from graphics, interactions and visualization (2022, methodology): “Lee et al. defined metaverse as a 3D virtual cyberspace blending the physical and digital world, facilitated by the convergence between the Internet and Web technologies and Extended Reality (XR) (Lee et al., 2021a).”
Is Metaverse in education a blessing or a curse: a combined content and bibliometric analysis (2022, background): “…technologies (Ning et al., 2021), post-reality universe, a perpetual and persistent multiuser environment merging physical reality with digital virtuality (Mystakidis et al., 2021), an omniverse: a venue of simulation and collaboration (Lee et al., 2021), and lifelogging (Bruun, & Stentoft, 2019).”
A Survey on the Metaverse: The State-of-the-Art, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges (2023, background): “Whether performing large-scale computational tasks remotely, accessing large databases, or providing shared experiences among users, they are inextricably linked to networks and communications [27].”
The rise and potential of large language model based agents: a survey (2025, unknown): “Behind each individual can be a piece of program, a real human, or an LLM-based agent as described in the previous sections [16, 400, 401].”
A Full Dive Into Realizing the Edge-Enabled Metaverse: Visions, Enabling Technologies, and Challenges (2022, methodology): “Following [16], [27], other surveys subsequently discuss more specific subsets of topics affiliated with the Metaverse.”