A Prelude to Cybersecurity Challenges in the Metaverse

Introduction

Widening up the horizons of the world as we know it, Extended Reality (XR) or cross reality is a collective term used to refer to all kinds of immersive technologies that rely on the use of spatial computing which facilitates and optimizes actions in these systems as defined by Qamar (2023). Extended Reality allows us to merge the physical and virtual worlds, seamlessly encompassing concepts of technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and the Metaverse. As days pass, the use of XR devices is becoming more widespread and ingrained into our day-to-day lives. From the military to e-commerce, XR finds applications in various forms, providing a much more realistic way to interact with the virtual world; conversely even a much less real way to interact with the physical world. Immersive technology first began to be developed around the 1960s, when the first headset was created by a scientist named Ivan Sutherland, as stated by Marr (2022). In 1975, Myron Krueger implemented a combination of video cameras and projectors to build a VR world known as a ‘Videoplace’. This research then observed rapid development and a variety of XR applications started to become available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. The term XR then started to be popularized and after 2010 various industries began to establish their XR product lines globally according to Mordor Intelligence (2021). Both AR and VR technologies are said to be the backbone of the immersive tech space. Figure 1 shows the development of AR, which began in the 1960s, and Figure 2 shows the events in the innovative space that led to what VR is today.

Figure 1.

History of research and development in augmented reality

Figure 2.

History of research and development in virtual reality

Notable companies that took a dip into the massive prospects of XR include Facebook, Sony, Samsung and Google. Now standing at the pinnacle of the progression of immersive technologies is the metaverse- a term not unfamiliar to most.