Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. This survey paper presents the first effort to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, and illustrates the possibility of the digital `big bang'. First, technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. We thus examine eight enabling technologies rigorously - Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, IoT and Robotics, Edge and Cloud computing, and Future Mobile Networks. In terms of applications, the metaverse ecosystem allows human users to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent, and shared realm. Therefore, we discuss six user-centric factors -- Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy, and Trust and Accountability. Finally, we propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.

All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda

The current and future challenges of sustainable development require a massive transformation of habits and behaviors in the whole society at many levels. This demands a change of perspectives, priorities, and practices that can only result from the development of more aware, informed, and instructed communities and individuals. The field of design for sustainable behavior is answering this need through the development of products, systems, and services to support the change of people’s habits and decision-making processes. In this regard, Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool: it has already been explored to drive sustainable behavior change in several situations, through a wide range of devices, technologies, and modalities. This variety provides uncountable opportunities to designers, but it comes with a series of ethical, psychological, and technical questions. Hence, VR developers should be able to distinguish and identify possible strategies, delivering suitable solutions for each case study. In this work, we present a framework for the development of VR experiences to support sustainable behavior change, based on a systematic review. We consider the various features to manage and possible alternatives when creating a VR experience, linking them to the behavioral aspects that can be addressed according to the project’s aim. The framework will provide designers with a tool to explore and orient themselves towards possible sets of optimal choices generating tailored solutions.

Exploring the Use of Virtual Reality to Support Environmentally Sustainable Behavior: A Framework to Design Experiences

Recently, there has been an explosive growth in the use of wireless devices, mainly due to the decrease in cost, size, and energy consumption. Researches into Internet of Things have focused on how to continuously monitor these devices in different scenarios, such as environmental and biodiversity tracking, considering both scalability and efficiency while searching and updating the devices information. For this, a combination of an efficient distributed structure and data aggregation method is used, allowing a device to manage a group of devices, minimizing the number of transmissions and saving energy. However, scalability is still a key challenge when the group is composed of a large number of devices. In this chapter, the authors propose a scalable architecture that distributes the data aggregation responsibility to the devices of the boundary of the group, and creates agents to manage groups and the interaction among them, such as merging and splitting. Experimental results showed the viability of adopting this architecture if compared with the most widely used approaches.

A Scalable Multiagent Architecture for Monitoring Biodiversity Scenarios

We introduce AstroSim, a Second Life based prototype application for synchronous collaborative visualization targeted at astronomers.

AstroSim: Collaborative Visualization of an Astrophysics Simulation in Second Life

Metaverse is the new buzz word in the field of technology, particularly in the media and industry. Studies of virtual spaces have been going on in academia for decades, and industry has been creating such spaces as commercial products. However, the specific term "metaverse" has been used sparingly, and when used, the definitions have been inconsistent. In an effort to understand how researchers are using this term, we conducted a systematic literature review and reviewed articles that used and defined the term metaverse. We categorized the main characteristics that researchers have defined as being properties of the metaverse, finding broad overlaps but divergence in details.

The Metaverse: A Systematic Literature Review to Map Scholarly Definitions

Agriculture, while of uttermost importance for society, may also have a strong negative impact on the environment. Hence we propose a game that offers players the opportunity to experience the effects of different styles of agriculture on the environment. The game was built with the purpose of promoting the awareness of agriculture issues, such as, (1) the impact of fertilizers in sources of fresh water, (2) the problems related to deforestation and impact on the weather, and (3) the importance of balancing environmental and economic perspectives in order to produce food of good quality with low impact on the environment—and at the same time keep the activity sustainable. To make players care about these issues, we added a direct impact of the players' actions on a population of non-player characters, the villagers, whose simple autonomous behaviors resemble that of living entities. The game was implemented in the multi-user online three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world platform Open-Simulator, which supports an immersive user experience and high accessibility. An experiment was performed and showed that the game improved players' knowledge about agriculture and their awareness of the environmental impact of agriculture.

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Asanee Kawtrakulc

Papers

AgriVillage: A Game to Foster Awareness of the Environmental Impact of Agriculture