[Paper Review] Metaverse: Survey, Applications, Security, and Opportunities

Jiayi Sun, Wensheng Gan+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Oct 14, 2022

Impact of AI and Big Data on Business and Society90 citations

TL;DR

A comprehensive survey of the Metaverse covering definitions, frameworks, technologies, applications, security/privacy issues, and future directions.

ABSTRACT

As a fusion of various emerging digital technologies, the Metaverse aims to build a virtual shared digital space. It is closely related to extended reality, digital twin, blockchain, and other technologies. Its goal is to build a digital space based on the real world, form a virtual economic system, and expand the space of human activities, which injects new vitality into the social, economic, and other fields. In this article, we make the following contributions. We first introduce the basic concepts such as the development process, definition, and characteristics of the Metaverse. After that, we analyze the overall framework and supporting technologies of the Metaverse and summarize the status of common fields. Finally, we focus on the security and privacy issues that exist in the Metaverse, and give corresponding solutions or directions. We also discuss the challenges and possible research directions of the Metaverse. We believe this comprehensive review can provide an overview of the Metaverse and research directions for some multidisciplinary studies.

Motivation & Objective

• Summarize the varying definitions and frameworks of the Metaverse and identify its core characteristics.
• Analyze the overall framework and supporting technologies that enable the Metaverse.
• Survey Metaverse applications across domains such as education, healthcare, smart cities, business, culture, and manufacturing.
• Discuss security and privacy threats in the Metaverse and present corresponding solutions and directions.
• Highlight challenges and propose future research directions for multidisciplinary studies.

Proposed method

• Perform a structured literature review to synthesize definitions, frameworks, and technologies.
• Propose and describe a four-layer framework (interaction, network, application, and supporting technologies) for the Metaverse.
• Survey and categorize Metaverse applications across multiple domains.
• Identify security and privacy threats and discuss potential solutions and safeguards.
• Compare with existing surveys to identify gaps and unique contributions of this work.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What are the defining concepts and characteristics of the Metaverse across literature?
• RQ2 What is the four-layer framework and what technologies support each layer?
• RQ3 What are the key applications of the Metaverse across education, healthcare, industry, and society?
• RQ4 What are the main security and privacy challenges in the Metaverse and what solutions exist or are needed?

Key findings

• This work provides a comprehensive review of Metaverse definitions, technical frameworks, applications, and security/privacy considerations.
• It identifies three core characteristics: spatio-temporal extensibility, virtual-real interaction, and human-computer symbiosis.
• It presents a four-layer framework (interaction, network, application, and supporting technologies) to structure Metaverse construction.
• It surveys security and privacy threats in depth and discusses corresponding solutions and future directions.
• It offers a roadmap of challenges and multidisciplinary research directions for advancing Metaverse research and deployment.