A Survey on the Metaverse: The State-of-the-Art, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges

TLDR

The Metaverse has recently attracted significant attention. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Metaverse. The authors review its development status, policy landscape, publication statistics, and categorize its technological framework into five dimensions, its social aspects, and its hyper‑spatio‑temporal characteristics, while also discussing challenges. The study identifies three key characteristics of the Metaverse: multitechnology convergence, sociality, and hyper‑spatio‑temporal immersion.

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of the Metaverse has attracted considerable attention. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Metaverse. First, the development status of the Metaverse is presented. We summarize the policies of various countries, companies, and organizations relevant to the Metaverse, as well as statistics on the number of Metaverse-related publications. Characteristics of the Metaverse are identified: 1) multitechnology convergence; 2) sociality; and 3) hyper-spatio-temporality. For the multitechnology convergence of the Metaverse, we divide the technological framework of the Metaverse into five dimensions. For the sociality of the Metaverse, we focus on the Metaverse as a virtual social world. Regarding the characteristic of hyper-spatio-temporality, we introduce the Metaverse as an open, immersive, and interactive 3-D virtual world which can break through the constraints of time and space in the real world. The challenges of the Metaverse are also discussed.