Integrating Digital Twin and Advanced Intelligent Technologies to Realize the Metaverse

TLDR

Artificial intelligence has accelerated advances across healthcare, education, and smart cities, yet the metaverse—a 3D virtual world blending reality and fantasy—requires scalable, secure communication and storage beyond traditional technologies. The article aims to identify the key challenges for realizing metaverse services. It proposes a digital‑twin‑enabled framework that combines 6G communication, blockchain, and AI to deliver continuous end‑to‑end metaverse experiences and outlines future requirements.

Abstract

The advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to technological advancements in a plethora of domains. Healthcare, education, and smart city services are now enriched with AI capabilities. These technological advancements would not have been realized without the assistance of fast, secure, and fault-tolerant communication media. Traditional processing, communication, and storage technologies cannot maintain high levels of scalability and user experience for immersive services. The metaverse is an immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual world that integrates fantasy and reality into a virtual environment using advanced virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices. Such an environment is still being developed and requires extensive research in order for it to be realized to its highest attainable levels. In this article, we discuss some of the key issues required in order to attain realization of metaverse services. We propose a framework that integrates digital twin (DT) with other advanced technologies, such as the sixth-generation (6G) communication network, blockchain, and AI, to maintain continuous end-to-end metaverse services. This article also outlines requirements for an integrated, DT-enabled metaverse framework and provides a look ahead into the evolving topic.