[Paper Review] A Survey on Metaverse: the State-of-the-art, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges

Huansheng Ning, Hang Wang+6 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Nov 18, 2021

Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts9 references358 citations

TL;DR

This survey reviews the Metaverse across five perspectives, outlining its technical framework, social nature, hyper spatiotemporality, early applications, and anticipated challenges.

ABSTRACT

Metaverse is a new type of Internet application and social form that integrates a variety of new technologies. It has the characteristics of multi-technology, sociality, and hyper spatiotemporality. This paper introduces the development status of Metaverse, from the five perspectives of network infrastructure, management technology, basic common technology, virtual reality object connection, and virtual reality convergence, it introduces the technical framework of Metaverse. This paper also introduces the nature of Metaverse's social and hyper spatiotemporality, and discusses the first application areas of Metaverse and some of the problems and challenges it may face.

Motivation & Objective

• Motivate a comprehensive understanding of Metaverse development and its driving technologies.
• Summarize the current development status from multiple technical and social perspectives.
• Present a technical framework for understanding Metaverse integration and convergence.
• Discuss the social nature and hyper spatiotemporal aspects of Metaverse and related challenges.

Proposed method

• Divide Metaverse into five analytical perspectives: network infrastructure, management technology, basic common technology, virtual reality object connection, and virtual reality convergence.
• Introduce a technical framework for Metaverse development.
• Describe the social and hyper spatiotemporality of Metaverse.
• Discuss initial application areas and foreseeable problems and challenges.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What is the current development status of Metaverse across key technical and social dimensions?
• RQ2 What technical framework best describes Metaverse components and their interactions?
• RQ3 What are the primary challenges and problems facing Metaverse deployment and adoption?
• RQ4 What are the initial application areas and how might they evolve?

Key findings

• Identifies five perspectives for evaluating Metaverse: network infrastructure, management technology, basic technologies, VR object connection, and VR convergence.
• Provides a technical framework to structure Metaverse development and integration.
• Characterizes Metaverse as having social characteristics and hyper spatiotemporality.
• Discusses the first application areas of Metaverse and outlines potential problems and challenges.