Chasing Metaverses: Reflecting on Existing Literature to Understand the Business Value of Metaverses

Metaverses refer to immersive virtual worlds in which people, places, and things of the physical world are represented by their digital representations. The wide adoption of metaverses is expected to widely disrupt the way we interact in the virtual world by elevating our online interactive experiences and bringing a plethora of implications for businesses. Following a structured literature review of related research published in the last decade, we shed light on our current understanding of metaverses and reflect on the potentially transformative value of metaverses for businesses in the near future. We draw on an established research framework to organize the insights of existing literature across different levels of analysis and activities’ purpose. Through this analysis, we reveal eight propositions on the changes brought by the use of metaverses and identify a number of open questions which could serve as future research avenues.publishedVersionPaid Open Acces

Are you in or not? A study into student intention to use immersive metaverse for learning

Learning and teaching have been transformed by technologies in the last few decades. The rise of immersive technologies, such as the metaverse, has started gaining educators’. This phenomenon brings the need for a thorough understanding of how the metaverse could be adopted effectively for learning purposes. This study applied the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) to investigate the variables affecting student intention of using immersive metaverse for learning purposes. An online survey was conducted to collect student responses from a US university. A sample of 81 responses was analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results indicate that compatibility and perceived risk influence perceived ease of use and usefulness. Perceived usefulness influences attitudes which consequently influence the intention to use. However, personal innovativeness was not found to influence perceived ease of use and usefulness. The perceived ease of use was not found to impact attitudes

El Metaverso en el campo de los juegos: una revisión sistemática de la literatura

En los últimos 30 años, el metaverso se está desarrollando de maneras que no podemos imaginar y nos fascina de una manera maravillosa. Hoy en día, se ha convertido en uno de los términos de búsqueda en Internet más populares y ha atraído una gran atención en el mundo actual. El principal objetivo de este trabajo es hacer una revisión sistemática de la literatura para ver qué se ha analizado en el contexto de metaverso vinculado con juegos. Los resultados relacionan con videojuegos, el diseño y desarrollo del metaverso, y sus aplicaciones relacionadas. Finalmente, este trabajo responde a tres preguntas centrales y plantea futuras líneas de investigación.<br /

Augmented Reality in Smart Cities: A Multimedia Approach

Intro: This paper presents an advance overview of utilizing Augmented Reality (AR) in smart cities. Although, Smart cities contain six major aspects (mobility, economy, government, environment, living, and people), this paper focuses on three of them that have more potentiality in using virtual assistant (mobility, environment, and living). Methodology: Presenting a state-of-the-art review studies undertake between 2013 and 2017, which is driven from highlighted libraries is the aim of this research. After exact examine, 15 emphasized studies are chosen to divide the main aspects while 120 selective articles are supporting them. These categorizes have been critically compared with an aim, method and chronological perspectives. Results: First of All, Environmental issues (Museums industry) attract the most attention of researchers while the living issues (maintenance) have lower significant compare t latter and mobility (indoor-outdoor navigation) attract the least. Moreover, a close connection between academic and industry fields is going to be created. Conclusions: it has been concluded that, because of economic advantages, utilizing AR technology has improved in the tourism and maintenance. Moreover, until now, most of studies try to prove their concept rather than illustrate well stablished analytic approach. Because of hardware and software improvement, it is essential for the future studies to evaluate their hypothesis in a real urban context

Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds

With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions

The power of immersive technologies: a sociopsychological analysis of the relationship between immersive environments, storytelling, sentiment, and the impact on user experience

This dissertation initially focused on exploring the potential of immersive technologies for the distant future. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019 disrupted the world, causing a pause in many areas. Nevertheless, the butterfly effect of the pandemic spurred the development of immersive technologies, resulting in the rise of the metaverse, web3, non-fungible tokens (NFT), and avatars, which are gaining increasing popularity. The excitement for the metaverse is growing in both academia and industry, leading to new avenues of research, digital marketing, video games, tourism, and social media. This dissertation explores this rapidly emerging technological revolution and its effects on user experience (UX)

Managing Crowded Museums: Visitors Flow Measurement, Analysis, Modeling, and Optimization

We present an all-around study of the visitors flow in crowded museums: a combination of Lagrangian field measurements and statistical analyses enable us to create stochastic digital-twins of the guests dynamics, unlocking comfort- and safety-driven optimizations. Our case study is the Galleria Borghese museum in Rome (Italy), in which we performed a real-life data acquisition campaign. We specifically employ a Lagrangian IoT-based visitor tracking system based on Raspberry Pi receivers, displaced in fixed positions throughout the museum rooms, and on portable Bluetooth Low Energy beacons handed over to the visitors. Thanks to two algorithms: a sliding window-based statistical analysis and an MLP neural network, we filter the beacons RSSI and accurately reconstruct visitor trajectories at room-scale. Via a clustering analysis, hinged on an original Wasserstein-like trajectory-space metric, we analyze the visitor paths to get behavioral insights, including the most common flow patterns. On these bases, we build the transition matrix describing, in probability, the room-scale visitor flows. Such a matrix is the cornerstone of a stochastic model capable of generating visitor trajectories in silico. We conclude by employing the simulator to increase the number of daily visitors while respecting numerous logistic and safety constraints. This is possible thanks to optimized ticketing and new entrance/exit management