Contents
What is Metaverse? .............................................................................................................................. 2
Why it is so popular?............................................................................................................................. 2
History of Metaverse ............................................................................................................................ 4
Key Technologies .................................................................................................................................. 5
Metaverse vs Virtual Reality ................................................................................................................. 6
Metaverse characteristics ..................................................................................................................... 7
Elements of Metaverse ......................................................................................................................... 8
Metaverse Architecture ........................................................................................................................ 9
Seven Layers of the Metaverse ........................................................................................................... 11
Metaverse Human Interface ............................................................................................................... 13
Haptic Devices ..................................................................................................................................... 14
Metaverse Development Platforms .................................................................................................... 15
Metaverse SDKs .................................................................................................................................. 17
Metaverse Use cases........................................................................................................................... 18
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linkedin.com/in/codemaker2015 Introduction to Metaverse
What is Metaverse?
The term metaverse was first coined by the author Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel
Snow Crash. He referred to it as a network of virtual worlds where we can perform activities as
we do in the physical world.
The metaverse is a moment in time in which all important aspects of our lives become digital.
you can also consider Metaverse as a 3d version of the internet. If you look at the user interface
side, primarily it was text-based where we transfer messages in a textual format like SMS.
Slowly it evolved to media-based where we can share media content such as images, videos and
audios. The next iteration of UI will be 3D where we will be able to transfer and socialize using
3D contents, that is metaverse.
The evolution of the internet can be divided into 3 phases.
Web 1.0: Where we were transferring just messages in the textual format like SMS.
Web 2.0: Where we can share media contents such as images, videos and audios.
Web 3.0: Where we can experience the internet in 3d and transfer 3D contents over the network.
Why it is so popular?
The above image depicts the metaverse market
overview, trends, share, growth, and research.
The analytics shows how much it popularized
over a year. The market potential of Metaverse
was just 47.69 billion USD in 2020. Within a
year, it increased to over 209.77 billion USD.
The covid outbreak accelerated the adoption of
the metaverse in all areas such as retail,
education, banking, etc. Even though covid had a
lot of negative impacts on our lives, it had an
immense positive effect on the immersive tech
side. It led to the adoption of AR VR
technologies and the growth of the metaverse
world.
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linkedin.com/in/codemaker2015 Introduction to Metaverse
In the latest Facebook connect,
Facebook CEO announced to rebrand
the company as Meta, and under the
Meta umbrella, the company is now
attempting to create a platform where
users will be able to “create, learn,
work, shop and socialize” across
various platforms. They acquired
Oculus in 2014. Now, the oculus quest
is considered as one of the primary
tools to build the metaverse world. This
rebranding made the metaverse concept
more popular across various sectors
around the globe.
Fig 1 Image credits fortunebusinessinsights
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linkedin.com/in/codemaker2015 Introduction to Metaverse
History of Metaverse
Fig 2 Image credits CNBC
The metaverse journey started with writer Neal Stephenson coining the term ‘metaverse’ to
describe a 3D virtual space in 1992. Now, the metaverse is a collection of digital worlds created
using different technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (VR),
cryptocurrency, and the Internet to play, work and socialize.
However, a lot has happened in the past 30 years, from the release of Second Life in 2003 to
Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 announcement of Facebook rebranding to Meta. Major tech giants such
as Facebook, Microsoft, Robolox, Decentraland and Amazon has made major contributions to
this journey. Few of these companies have acquired Twitch, Minecraft, Oculus, and AltspaceVR
which are useful in building the ‘future internet’.
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linkedin.com/in/codemaker2015 Introduction to Metaverse
Key Technologies
Metaverse is all about virtual worlds. It provides an immersive way to visualize, collaborate and
socialize things in extended reality. Extended reality comprises of Augmented reality, Virtual
reality and Mixed reality.
Let us try to understand AR, VR and MR.
• Augmented Reality (AR) — An interactive experience of the real-world environment
where virtual objects are augmented over real-world objects. This can be achieved by
computer-generated perceptual information, across multiple sensory modalities such as
visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.
• Virtual Reality (VR) — Teleports users into a virtual world that simulates a physical
presence in places in the real world or in the imaginary world. It can create sensory
experiences which include sight, touch, hearing and smell.
• Mixed Reality (MR) — Virtual content is not only overlaid on the real environment but
also users can interact with that environment.
Fig 3 Image credits rubygarage.org
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Metaverse vs Virtual Reality
Metaverse is a collection of virtual worlds. We may be confused that it is just a virtual reality
application rather than a metaverse even though there is a huge difference between these two
terms.
Let’s understand the major differences between a metaverse and a virtual reality application.
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Metaverse characteristics
Here is a breakdown of some of the features that define a metaverse.
Fig 4 Image credits: Sensoriumxr
• Boundless — As an infinite virtual space, the Metaverse removes all forms of barriers. There
are no restrictions on the number of individuals who can use it at the same time, the
industries that can use it, the types of activities that can take place, and so on.
• Persistent — Metaverse can be a fully online platform that allows users to have a consistent
experience. It can be accessed from anywhere in the world at any time.
• Decentralized — Metaverse is decentralised, as it is not held by a single company or
platform. It will be a decentralised network that employs blockchain technology to ensure
that all virtual world transactions are transparent, traceable, and secure at all times.
• Immersive — A VR headset, AR glasses, and a smartphone are all need to explore the
incredibly realistic, immersive metaverse universe. It can adjust to the surroundings based on
user preferences for colors, lighting, and other factors.
• Virtual Economics — Cryptocurrency allows users to participate in decentralised virtual
economies. It comprises digital asset marketplaces where users can buy, sell, and trade items
like avatars, virtual apparel, NFTs, and event tickets.
• Social Experiences — Metaverse is all about social experience. In a virtual world, every
member can interact with one another in a shared virtual space.
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Elements of Metaverse
Metaverse is not an application built on a single technology. It is a combination of multiple
elements such as social media, online shopping, digital assets, digital currency, NFTs,
marketplace, and so on.
Let’s understand some of the key elements of the metaverse.
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Metaverse Architecture
Metaverse is a synthesized world that is comprised of digital assets, virtual environments,
avatars, and other computer-generated elements. It allows humans (represented by avatars) to use
their virtual identity through any smart device to communicate, collaborate, and socialize with
each other.
Fig 5 Image credits Alex G. Lee
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• Human Society — The metaverse is capable of capturing human users along with their inner
psychologies and social interactions. Humans can control their digital avatars and interact
with each other in virtual environments. They can play, work, and socialize in the metaverse
using smart wearable devices such as VR/AR HMD devices.
• Physical Infrastructures — It offers supporting infrastructures to the metaverse to support
multi-sensory data perception, caching, processing, and transmission thereby enabling
efficient interactions with both the digital and human worlds. Smart objects, sensors, and
actuators creates multimodal data perception from the environment and human bodies with
high-accuracy device control. Networking connectivity is provided via the communication
infrastructure which includes various wired and wireless networks. Storage capacities and
powerful computation capabilities are provided via the computation and storage
infrastructure assisted by cloud/edge computing.
• Interconnected Virtual Worlds — The digital world can be a collection of interconnected
distributed virtual worlds and each virtual world can offer certain kinds of virtual
goods/services (e.g., gaming and social dating) and virtual environments (e.g., game scenes
and virtual cities) to the users represented as digital avatars.
• Digital avatars — Digital representation of human users in the metaverse.
• Virtual environments — Simulated real or imaginary environments (consisting of 3D digital
things and their attributes) in the metaverse.
• Virtual goods/services — Tradeable commodities (e.g., digital arts, skins and lands)
produced by virtual service providers or the users in the metaverse. It includes digital market,
digital currency, digital regulation, social service, etc.
• Metaverse Engine — The metaverse engine uses big data from the real world as the input to
generate and update the virtual world using AI, digital twin, and blockchain technologies. AI
algorithms perform personalized avatar/content creation, largescale metaverse rending, and
intelligent service offering to enrich the metaverse ecology. The knowledge derived via AI-
based big data analytics is beneficial to perform simulating, digitalizing, and mirroring the
real world via digital twin technology. This can be used to produce vivid virtual
environments for users to experience. With the assistance of XR and HCI techniques, users
situated in physical environments are able to control their digital avatars in the metaverse in
an immersive way. This can be achieved via their senses and bodies for diverse collective
and social activities such as gaming, dating, and trading. Finally, the created digital twins can
be transparently managed, uniquely tokenized, and monetized by blockchain technology to
enable trust-free trading and service offerings in the metaverse.
Refer to the following paper to know more about the metaverse architecture.
A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy
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Seven Layers of the Metaverse
Nowadays, everyone is trying to come up with their own explanation of the metaverse. Yet, we
haven’t arrived at any conclusion. However, Jon Radoff, an entrepreneur, author and game
designer came up with a systematic explanation of the metaverse. His seven-layered model is
already being used in many online publications.
Fig 6 Image credits: building-the-metaverse - Jon Radoff
• Layer 1: Experience — Experience is where the user engages with games, shopping, sports,
immersive virtual worlds, digital assets, and more.
Gaming demonstrates many of these features such as immersion in virtual environments,
avatar identities, storytelling, and real-time social interactions. Also, it includes many other
everyday experiences where the physical and digital worlds collide such as Zoom meetings,
gym workouts and so on.
• Layer 2: Discovery — Discovery is the advertising network whose parts are stores, rating
systems and social recommendations. Discovery can be enabled by inbound / outbound
information sharing systems. Inbound includes community content platforms where people
can find out the likes and recommendations given by other users whereas outbound discovery
includes notifications and display ads.
Real-time presence is one of the key features of metaverse discovery where users can get a
glimpse of what other users are engaging currently in the metaverse and will be able to join
in the shared experience.
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• Layer 3: Creator Economy — Creator Economy opens a way to create digital content
without any programming knowledge like creating videos on YouTube. The experiences
provided by the creator economy will be immersive, social, real-time and highly
personalized.
• Layer 4: Spatial Computing — Spatial computing is an important feature that allows users
to access and manipulate 3D spaces as a blending of physical and virtual spaces. It refers to
3D engines, programs, AR, VR, XR, and mapping which help us to break down the barriers
that exist between physical and virtual spaces. It also includes the Internet of things (IoT),
voice recognition and gesture recognition technology.
3D engines such as Unity and Unreal enables the users to create the experience of the
physical reality. Omniverse by Nvidia is a platform where creators can collaborate in an
interoperable 3D space whereas Microsoft’s HoloLens is a great example of what we can do
on the spatial computing layer.
• Layer 5: Decentralization — One of the key features of the metaverse is decentralization
which will enable the metaverse to be decentralized, open, and distributed. It includes
blockchain technology, smart contracts, open-source platforms and self-sovereign digital
identity.
To utilize the full potential of the metaverse, it should have a transparent and traceable way
to perform transactions and interactions. It can be achieved through blockchain, crypto assets
and NFTs.
Decentraland is a well-known example of the decentralized metaverse which is a
decentralized virtual world running on the Ethereum blockchain and controlled by a
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
• Layer 6: Human Interface — Human interface refers to all the technology that extends the
human interactions with the digital assets. It includes mobiles, VR headsets, smart glasses,
gestures, voice, haptics, wearables and neural networks. Oculus Quest is a great example of
the same. 3D printed wearables, biosensors and interfaces between brains and computers
expand our interactions more digital and simpler.
• Layer 7: Infrastructure — Infrastructure refers to all the technologies that enables, connects
and powers the digital devices. It includes data centers, cloud computing, wireless, materials
and processing, and covers the development of 5G computing built with microchips that are
just getting denser and faster. With the evolution of infrastructure from cloud computing to
edge computing, the storage and computation of data have been brought to a closer location
as and where data is produced and used.
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Metaverse Human Interface
HMD Devices
VR headsets, smart glasses, and haptic technology enable users to transport themselves (as
avatars) into the metaverse. Following are some of the selected headsets for visualizing the
metaverse content.
• Microsoft HoloLens 2 — Microsoft HoloLens 2 is a mixed reality (MR) headset developed
and manufactured by Microsoft. It is considered a premium solution for visualizing the
metaverse. It provides better user interactions using the power of its spatial computing
engine.
• Meta Quest 2 — The Meta Quest 2 is a virtual reality (VR) headset developed by Meta
(formerly Facebook). It is considered a cost-friendly solution for visualizing the metaverse. It
has been given a serious uplift in performance compared to the previous version with a
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC and 6GB of RAM.
• HP Reverb G2 — The HP Reverb G2 VR headset is a groundbreaking creation of headsets in
the virtual reality market. It is the first headset to combine eye tracking, face tracking
equipped with a heart rate sensor, a face camera, industry-leading lenses, Valve speakers and
4 cameras. It comes with an intelligent engine called Omnicept which includes machine
learning and a cognitive load insight engine.
• Lenovo Think Reality A3 — Weightless and cost-efficient smart glass where the users can
run all android smartphone apps in the AR space.
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Haptic Devices
Haptic technology refers to any technology that can create an experience of touch by applying
forces, motions, or vibrations to the user. It also improves human interactions and makes the
metaverse more authentic.
• Haptx Glove — HaptX Gloves combine industrial standard haptics and natural interaction
with the VR apps. Its DK2 SDK provides a realistic touch sensation, unlike any other device.
It is built with patented microfluidic technology.
• SenseGlove Nova — SenseGlove Nova has a futuristic design that is designed like a glove
which can be worn in just five seconds. It can simulate the feeling of shapes, textures,
stiffness, impact, and resistance using force feedback, vibrotactile feedback, and motion
tracking technologies.
• VRGluv — VRgluv haptic gloves gives you full control of your hands in VR, unlocking a
wide variety of new interactions, experiences and gestures with the help of Force Feedback
technology.
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Metaverse Development Platforms
Creating a virtual world from scratch with functionalities is not an easy task. There are a couple
of metaverse IDEs (Game engines such as Unity and Unreal) and low code platforms available in
the market which can enable users to create a metaverse world seamlessly.
• Nvidia Omniverse — Omniverse is a development platform for 3D simulation and design
collaborations. It combines graphics, AI, simulation tools and scalable computing to assist
the users to create 3D assets from their machines. It is capable of interacting and combining
virtual worlds into a shared virtual scene.
• Unity — Unity is one of the most popular cross-platform game engines used to build AR and
VR apps. It provides a complete set of metaverse solutions to build and run interactive, real-
time 3D content for various digital devices including smartphones, HMD devices, VR
devices, haptics and so on.
• Unreal —Similar to Unity, Unreal Engine is a 3D game engine used to build AR and VR
apps. It also provides various solutions to build and run a metaverse world on different target
devices such as Oculus Quest, Hololens 2 and Smart glasses.
• OpenXR — OpenXR is an open, standard API that enables the development and deployment
of portable, cross-platform AR/VR (XR) runtimes.
• Zepeto — The metaverse platform of Korea’s tech giant Naver.
• Hubs by mozilla — An online 3D collaboration platform that works for desktop, mobile, and
VR platforms. It helps the users to meet, share and collaborate with each other in virtual
spaces.
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Microsoft Mesh
Mesh is a collaborative platform that enables
users to experience shared experiences
remotely from any device through mixed
reality applications. Using Mesh, you can
experience the feel of teleporting to a shared
virtual space with other users where you can
share content using different MR devices.
You can meet and interact with people even
though when you are not physically together.
Meta Horizon Workrooms
Horizon Workrooms is a flagship product that
provides a collaborative experience where
people come together to work in the same
virtual room, regardless of physical distance.
You can experience Workrooms in Oculus
Quest 2. Workrooms combine new
technologies such as keyboard tracking, hand
tracking, remote desktop streaming, video
conferencing integration, and spatial audio to
experience the metaverse world.
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Metaverse SDKs
Software Development Kits (SDK) are useful to reduce the barriers between the user and the
latest technology, metaverse. Here are a few SDKs which will be helpful to assist you in the
metaverse journey.
• Moralis — The Moralis Metaverse SDK allows developers to create web3 games and
metaverse experiences on various blockchains. It provides a unity package that enables
publishing of the metaverse apps for web, mobile, desktop and other devices.
• Nvidia Omniverse Kit— Omniverse Kit is a powerful toolkit for developers to build their
own apps, extensions, and microservices for their ecosystem. The SDK can be run as a
microservice or with a UI.
• Metaverse iOS SDK — iOS targeted SDK which is used to render metaverse experiences
inside of your apps. You can create, build and test the apps build on the SDK with Metaverse
Studio or Metaverse Browser, and then render them on your device.
• Oculus Meta Avatar SDK — Developers can create custom Meta Avatars to increase social
presence in the metaverse. Avatars are provided as modularized full-bodied torsos and the
user has the freedom to customize them.
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Metaverse Use cases
Metaverse has the potential to create use cases in different industries such as education, retail,
manufacturing, and military. We can do a lot of things in the metaverse which includes virtual
tourism, virtual venues for small events, selling lands, purchasing houses, gaming online, and
immersive training, etc.
These are a few potential use cases of the metaverse,
• Rapid production process design — We can easily drag and drop assets in a physics-based
simulation on metaverse. And easily identify how to be more efficient and safer in
manufacturing without the need to perform significant physical testing.
• More collaborative product development — It is super easy for different stakeholders to
design a product, share it with manufacturers within the environment, and iterate based on
feedback, which will shorten the product life cycle for the projects.
• Reduced risk to quality control — More detailed and augmented product design enabled
with user interaction which will further reduce the margin of error in production.
• Increased transparency for customers — Customers are interested to see the metaverse
adoption and the changes in the supply chain process with 3D representations for how
products are built, sold, and distributed.
• Immersive entertainment — Entertainment in the metaverse is garnering a lot of interest,
particularly from youngsters who are likely to drive metaverse growth even though it may
not seem to have applicability to the enterprise.
• Improved education and training — The pandemic accelerated the adoption of AR VR in
education and which lead to the growth of e-learning. It is expected to stream data in real-
time and support real-time interactions in the virtual space which would change and improve
content delivery and learning.
• Virtual meetings — The tech companies such as Meta and Microsoft are trying to create
metaverse solutions for virtual meetings as a replacement to traditional zoom meetings to
engance social interactions. In near future, the technology will be able to transport workers
from one location to other work locations and let them interact with others in the shared
virtual worlds.
• Advanced blockchain use cases — Blockchain or decentralized technology is essential for
the mass adoption of the Metaverse across the industries. With Metaverse, companies can
build more realistic NFT marketplaces where users can make better buying decisions.
• Virtual Tourism — VR tourism is one of the trending use cases of a metaverse that has the
potential for mainstream adoption and recognition. Popular video streaming platforms such
as YouTube, Netflix, and many others are migrating their platforms to accommodate 3d
content like 360-degree videos.
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