1,110 research outputs found
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
Metaverse for Wireless Systems: Architecture, Advances, Standardization, and Open Challenges
The growing landscape of emerging wireless applications is a key driver
toward the development of novel wireless system designs. Such a design can be
based on the metaverse that uses a virtual model of the physical world systems
along with other schemes/technologies (e.g., optimization theory, machine
learning, and blockchain). A metaverse using a virtual model performs proactive
intelligent analytics prior to a user request for efficient management of the
wireless system resources. Additionally, a metaverse will enable
self-sustainability to operate wireless systems with the least possible
intervention from network operators. Although the metaverse can offer many
benefits, it faces some challenges as well. Therefore, in this tutorial, we
discuss the role of a metaverse in enabling wireless applications. We present
an overview, key enablers, design aspects (i.e., metaverse for wireless and
wireless for metaverse), and a novel high-level architecture of metaverse-based
wireless systems. We discuss metaverse management, reliability, and security of
the metaverse-based system. Furthermore, we discuss recent advances and
standardization of metaverse-enabled wireless system. Finally, we outline open
challenges and present possible solutions
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
Quality of Service improvements for real time multimedia applications using next generation network architectures and blockchain in Internet Service Provider cooperative scenario
Real time communications are becoming part of our daily life, requiring constrained requisites with the purpose of being enjoyed in harmony by end users. The factors ruling these requisites are Quality of Service parameters of the users' Internet connections. Achieving a satisfactory QoS level for real time communications depends on parameters that are strongly influenced by the quality of the network connections among the Internet Service Providers, which are located in the path between final users and Over The Top service providers that are supplying them with real time services. Final users can be: business people having real time videoconferences, or adopting crytpocurrencies in their exchanges, videogamers playing online games together with others residing in other countries, migrants talking with their relatives or watching their children growing up in their home countries, people with disabilities adopting tecnologies to help them, doctors performing remote surgeries, manufacturers adopting augmented reality devices to perform dangerous tasks. Each of them performing their daily activities are requiring specific QoS parameters to their ISPs, that nowadays seem to be unable to provide them with a satisfactory QoS level for these kinds of real time services. Through the adoption of next generation networks, such as the Information Centric Networking, it would be possible to overcome the QoS problems that nowadays are experienced. By adopting Blockchain technologies, in several use cases, it would be possible to improve those security aspects related to the non-temperability of information and privacy. I started this thesis analyzing next generation architectures enabling real time multimedia communications. In Software Defined Networking, Named Data Networking and Community Information Centric Networking, I highlighted potential approaches to solve QoS problems that are affecting real time multimedia applications. During my experiments I found that applications able to transmit high quality videos, such as 4k or 8k videos, or to directly interact with devices AR/VR enabled are missing for both ICN approaches. Then I proposed a REST interface for the enforcing of a specific QoS parameter, the round trip time (RTT) taking into consideration the specific use case of a game company that connects with the same telecommunication company of the final user. Supposing that the proposed REST APIs have been deployed in the game company and in the ISP, when one or more users are experiencing lag, the game company will try to ask the ISP to reduce the RTT for that specific user or that group of users. This request can be done by performing a call to a method where IP address(es) and the maximum RTT desired are passed. I also proposed other methods, through which it would be possible to retrieve information about the QoS parameters, and exchange, if necessary, an exceeding parameter in change of another one. The proposed REST APIs can also be used in more complex scenarios, where ISPs along the path are chained together, in order to improve the end to end QoS among Over The Top service provider and final users. To store the information exchanged by using the proposed REST APIs, I proposed to adopt a permissioned blockchain, analizying the ISPs cooperative use case with Hyperledger Fabric, where I proposed the adoption of the Proof of Authority consensus algorithm, to increase the throughput in terms of transactions per second. In a specific case that I examined, I am proposing a combination of Information Centric Networking and Blockchain, in an architecture where ISPs are exchanging valuable information regarding final Users, to improve their QoS parameters. I also proposed my smart contract for the gaming delay use case, that can be used to rule the communication among those ISPs that are along the path among OTT and final users. An extension of this work can be done, by defining billing costs for the QoS improvements
Forensic Analysis of Immersive Virtual Reality Social Applications: A Primary Account
Our work presents the primary account for exploring the forensics of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems and their social applications. The Social VR applications studied in this work include Bigscreen, Altspace VR, Rec Room and Facebook Spaces. We explored the two most widely adopted consumer VR systems: the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Our tests examined the efficacy of reconstructing evidence from network traffic as well as the systems themselves. The results showed that a significant amount of forensically relevant data such as user names, user profile pictures, events, and system details may be recovered. We anticipate that this work will stimulate future research directions in VR and Augmented Reality (AR) forensics as it is an area that is understudied and needs more attention from the community
Eyewear Computing \u2013 Augmenting the Human with Head-Mounted Wearable Assistants
The seminar was composed of workshops and tutorials on head-mounted eye tracking, egocentric
vision, optics, and head-mounted displays. The seminar welcomed 30 academic and industry
researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia with a diverse background, including wearable and
ubiquitous computing, computer vision, developmental psychology, optics, and human-computer
interaction. In contrast to several previous Dagstuhl seminars, we used an ignite talk format to
reduce the time of talks to one half-day and to leave the rest of the week for hands-on sessions,
group work, general discussions, and socialising. The key results of this seminar are 1) the
identification of key research challenges and summaries of breakout groups on multimodal eyewear
computing, egocentric vision, security and privacy issues, skill augmentation and task guidance,
eyewear computing for gaming, as well as prototyping of VR applications, 2) a list of datasets and
research tools for eyewear computing, 3) three small-scale datasets recorded during the seminar, 4)
an article in ACM Interactions entitled \u201cEyewear Computers for Human-Computer Interaction\u201d,
as well as 5) two follow-up workshops on \u201cEgocentric Perception, Interaction, and Computing\u201d
at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) as well as \u201cEyewear Computing\u201d at
the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)
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