Peer-to-peer interactive 3D media dissemination in networked virtual environments

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

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 beyond the hype: Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy

The metaverse has the potential to extend the physical world using augmented and virtual reality technologies allowing users to seamlessly interact within real and simulated environments using avatars and holograms. Virtual environments and immersive games (such as, Second Life, Fortnite, Roblox and VRChat) have been described as antecedents of the metaverse and offer some insight to the potential socio-economic impact of a fully functional persistent cross platform metaverse. Separating the hype and “meta…” rebranding from current reality is difficult, as “big tech” paints a picture of the transformative nature of the metaverse and how it will positively impact people in their work, leisure, and social interaction. The potential impact on the way we conduct business, interact with brands and others, and develop shared experiences is likely to be transformational as the distinct lines between physical and digital are likely to be somewhat blurred from current perceptions. However, although the technology and infrastructure does not yet exist to allow the development of new immersive virtual worlds at scale - one that our avatars could transcend across platforms, researchers are increasingly examining the transformative impact of the metaverse. Impacted sectors include marketing, education, healthcare as well as societal effects relating to social interaction factors from widespread adoption, and issues relating to trust, privacy, bias, disinformation, application of law as well as psychological aspects linked to addiction and impact on vulnerable people. This study examines these topics in detail by combining the informed narrative and multi-perspective approach from experts with varied disciplinary backgrounds on many aspects of the metaverse and its transformational impact. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda that is valuable for researchers, professionals and policy makers alike

Investigating Collaborative Development Activities in a Virtual World: An Activity Theory Perspective

Contemporary virtual worlds provide unique environments in which users may collaborate in the development of shared digital artifacts. However, the ways in which such collaboration takes place is to date under researched. This paper uses an activity theory perspective to analyze the development activities of two communities within the virtual world of Second Life, based on data gathered using ethnographic methods. The study reveals (1) the complimentary and diverging practices utilized by these two different communities of practice, (2) the mediating function of various tools, rules, and work roles in collaborative development activities, (3) the tensions created in such activities and the manner in which users overcome these tensions

Supporting Non-Linear and Non-Continuous Media Access in Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Metaverse beyond the hype: Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy

The metaverse has the potential to extend the physical world using augmented and virtual reality technologies allowing users to seamlessly interact within real and simulated environments using avatars and holograms. Virtual environments and immersive games (such as, Second Life, Fortnite, Roblox and VRChat) have been described as antecedents of the metaverse and offer some insight to the potential socio-economic impact of a fully functional persistent cross platform metaverse. Separating the hype and “meta…” rebranding from current reality is difficult, as “big tech” paints a picture of the transformative nature of the metaverse and how it will positively impact people in their work, leisure, and social interaction. The potential impact on the way we conduct business, interact with brands and others, and develop shared experiences is likely to be transformational as the distinct lines between physical and digital are likely to be somewhat blurred from current perceptions. However, although the technology and infrastructure does not yet exist to allow the development of new immersive virtual worlds at scale - one that our avatars could transcend across platforms, researchers are increasingly examining the transformative impact of the metaverse. Impacted sectors include marketing, education, healthcare as well as societal effects relating to social interaction factors from widespread adoption, and issues relating to trust, privacy, bias, disinformation, application of law as well as psychological aspects linked to addiction and impact on vulnerable people. This study examines these topics in detail by combining the informed narrative and multi-perspective approach from experts with varied disciplinary backgrounds on many aspects of the metaverse and its transformational impact. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda that is valuable for researchers, professionals and policy makers alike

CONTRACTUAL GOVERNANCE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES – (PROPERTY) RIGHTS DISPUTES IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

Considering law’s difficult ride on the coattails of societal and technological progress, this thesis discusses property rights disputes in virtual worlds, the origin and foundation of (property) rights in characters, objects and items (virtual assets), and the possibility of contractual governance. Investing considerable time, effort and money to create, develop and accumulate virtual assets to gain prestige or competitive advantage, or simply to have more fun playing, users often build strong emotional connections to their characters and place a high value on accumulated operator, third user and user-generated content. But the user’s experience of virtual assets as property, contrasts starkly with most in-world property models where first property rights belong to the operator, subsequent rights are delineated by contract, and emerging property rights are transferred to the operator or waived by the user. Noting the ‘technologically inaccurate portrayal of software’ in legislation, jurisprudence and legal debate, that ignores its ‘physical properties of mass and volume’, and the influence of client/server system architecture on the allocation of personal property rights, this thesis shows that physical and intellectual rights cannot resolve the newly emerging property rights disputes in virtual worlds. Instead of making another helpless attempt to justify a new virtual property right that still cannot overcome an enforceable transfer/waiver of (future) (property) rights clause in the contract, this author questions common concepts of property and proposes a new quasi-property right. Originated in the contractual obligation of the operator to grant the user a right to use, to exclude other users from and to transfer virtual assets, the rules of conduct included in the multiple-separate user contract complete its quasi-absolute effect. This quasi-property right does not only complement the quasi-tort, quasi-criminal and quasi-constitutional system already established by the (virtual social) contract but supports the identification of the contract (terms) as new default legal rules for VWs and similar online communities

Management and Visualisation of Non-linear History of Polygonal 3D Models

The research presented in this thesis concerns the problems of maintenance and revision control of large-scale three dimensional (3D) models over the Internet. As the models grow in size and the authoring tools grow in complexity, standard approaches to collaborative asset development become impractical. The prevalent paradigm of sharing files on a file system poses serious risks with regards, but not limited to, ensuring consistency and concurrency of multi-user 3D editing. Although modifications might be tracked manually using naming conventions or automatically in a version control system (VCS), understanding the provenance of a large 3D dataset is hard due to revision metadata not being associated with the underlying scene structures. Some tools and protocols enable seamless synchronisation of file and directory changes in remote locations. However, the existing web-based technologies are not yet fully exploiting the modern design patters for access to and management of alternative shared resources online. Therefore, four distinct but highly interconnected conceptual tools are explored. The first is the organisation of 3D assets within recent document-oriented No Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases. These "schemaless" databases, unlike their relational counterparts, do not represent data in rigid table structures. Instead, they rely on polymorphic documents composed of key-value pairs that are much better suited to the diverse nature of 3D assets. Hence, a domain-specific non-linear revision control system 3D Repo is built around a NoSQL database to enable asynchronous editing similar to traditional VCSs. The second concept is that of visual 3D differencing and merging. The accompanying 3D Diff tool supports interactive conflict resolution at the level of scene graph nodes that are de facto the delta changes stored in the repository. The third is the utilisation of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the purposes of 3D data management. The XML3DRepo daemon application exposes the contents of the repository and the version control logic in a Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture. At the same time, it manifests the effects of various 3D encoding strategies on the file sizes and download times in modern web browsers. The fourth and final concept is the reverse-engineering of an editing history. Even if the models are being version controlled, the extracted provenance is limited to additions, deletions and modifications. The 3D Timeline tool, therefore, implies a plausible history of common modelling operations such as duplications, transformations, etc. Given a collection of 3D models, it estimates a part-based correspondence and visualises it in a temporal flow. The prototype tools developed as part of the research were evaluated in pilot user studies that suggest they are usable by the end users and well suited to their respective tasks. Together, the results constitute a novel framework that demonstrates the feasibility of a domain-specific 3D version control

Transforming the museum-community nexus with technology : a virtual museum infrastructure for participatory engagement and management

Museums play an important role in society as the custodians of heritage, and advances in technology have brought about opportunities for curating, preserving and disseminating heritage through virtual museums. However, this is not matched by an understanding of how these technologies can support these functions, especially given the varying levels of resources that museums have at their disposal. To address this problem, a hybrid methodology which combines underpinning theory and practice has been adopted. Initial investigation of the problem takes place through a contextualisation of museology and heritage studies, followed by exploratory case studies that yield design objectives for a Virtual Museum Infrastructure (VMI). A design of the VMI is proposed based on these objectives, and the VMI is instantiated, deployed and evaluated in real-world scenarios using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings of this investigation demonstrate that the use of technology provides new opportunities for engagement with heritage, as experts and community members alike can create, curate and preserve content, which can then be disseminated in engaging ways using immersive, yet affordable technologies. This work therefore demonstrates how technology can be used to: (1) support museums in the creation, curation, preservation and dissemination of heritage, through a VMI that provides support for all the stages of the media life cycle, (2) facilitate active use, so that content that is created once can be reused on multiple platforms (for example on the web, on mobile apps and in on-site installations), and (3) encourage connectivity by linking up local museums using a location-aware interface and facilitates the consumption content using digital literacies available to the public. The aforementioned points, coupled with the system instantiations that demonstrate them, represent the contributions of this thesis

A framework for the visualisation and control of ubiquitous devices, services and digital content

The General Organization for Technical Education and Vocational Training, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has developed a special feeding program for the students at its institutions. The effects of this program on the nutritional and health status of these students have not been evaluated yet, and since no published dietary research has been performed on Technical and Vocational young adult male students, the present work was undertaken to investigate the nutritional status of this community in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After a pilot survey, it was decided to use a selfcompleted questionnaire combined with personal interview to investigate the nutritional status of 690 students randomly selected from the study population. Dietary data was collected by two methods: usual weekly intakes "diet history" and actual daily intakes "diet diary". The nutrient intakes were calculated using the unilever Dietary Analysis Program (UNIDAP). The statistical Package for the social Science (SPSS/PC+) was employed to analyse the data; statistical significance of relationships between certain sets of data was determined by chi-square analysis. Some general factors affecting the nutritional status of these students were identified, their nutritional habits and attitudes were investigated, and the average daily intakes of energy, the macronutrients, and selected micronutrients were calculated. The main results of this study shows that the majority of the study population are adolescent, moderately active individuals, and have lower than the standard range of the Body Mass Index; anaemia is the most stated health problem; meal-skipping and eating between meals are common habits amongst the students. Regarding nutrient intake, there was an energy, polyunsaturated fat, and vitamin C deficiency; adequate intake of saturated fat, dietary fibre, retinol, and zinc; more than adequate intake of protein, total fat, cholesterol, thiamin, riboflavin, calcium, and iron. Recommendations are given which aim to improve the nutrition of technical and vocational students