The term metaverse signifies various things to various people. While it broadly refers to a virtual shared space at the confluence of Web 3.0, augmented reality, virtual reality, and enabling technologies such as blockchain, there is a fair bit of divergence when it comes to the implications of metaverse on important aspects of day-to-day life, be it finance, entertainment, or education. Preteens today may find it perfectly natural to spend large chunks of their playtime inside their co-created virtual ecosystems within Roblox or Minecraft, hanging out with their friends and showing off their creative sides, even accumulating virtual currencies. This behaviour, when internalised by larger groups, can potentially pave the way for other physical world interactions to be moved to the virtual arena, notably those related with education. With the elements of on-demand availability, interactive feedback, and customised delivery mechanisms, the metaverse can emerge as the go-to destination for many learners and educators alike.
TopIntroduction
Today the term metaverse signifies various things to various people. While it broadly refers to a virtual shared space at the confluence of web 3.0, augmented reality, virtual reality and enabling technologies such as blockchain, there is a fair bit of divergence when it comes to the implications of metaverse on important aspects of day-to-day life, be it finance, entertainment or education. Preteens today may find it perfectly natural to spend large chunks of their playtime inside their co-created virtual ecosystems within Roblox or Minecraft, hanging out with their friends and showing off their creative sides, even accumulating virtual currencies. This behaviour, when internalised by larger groups, can potentially pave the way for other physical world interactions to be moved to the virtual arena, notably those related with education. With the elements of on demand availability, interactive feedback and customised delivery mechanisms, the Metaverse can emerge as the go-to destination for many learners and educators alike. Not just for mundane tasks like teaching of curricular subjects through visualization and storytelling, metaverse can also solve the wicked problems of accessibility, affordability and customization in areas such as education for underserved communities and upskilling for working professionals. Many services companies are focusing in using the new technology so as to increase efficiency and provide speed of services, this leads to better customer engagement and experiences. The progressive growth in the IT has prompted in leveraging the digitalization of final services and enhance sustainable growth and development. (Bathla et al., 2021).
Some people might consider the metaverse to merely be a new term for VR or AR; however, it is much more than AR or VR (Park & Kim, 2022). There are three features of the metaverse that make it quite different from conventional VR or AR: “shared,” “persistent,” and “de-centralized.” Moreover, artificial intelligence (AI) is a required technology to enable the world of the metaverse to work following the rules defined by the creator. From this framework, it can be seen that an AR or VR system could be part of the metaverse for presenting the virtual content; on the other hand, the metaverse could contain AR or VR elements plus other required elements. Regarding the feature of “shared,” a student learning with a VR training system alone cannot be considered as an example of the metaverse in education. In a multi-user VR system, such as Second Life, people can interact with others using a new identity; however, if the system is unable to provide a persistent world enabling users to “live,” such as working, owning, learning, interacting, creating, and entertainment, it is not a metaverse from the perspective of “persistent.” Moreover, decentralized technologies (e.g., blockchains) are required to ensure that the economic activities can be safely conducted and that personal property and logs in the metaverse will not be modified by others (Min & Cai, 2022).
Meanwhile, it is important to know that AI generally plays an important role in the metaverse. To ensure that the “world” of a metaverse functions following the rules defined by its creator, AI technologies are needed. “Arbitration” is one of the functions executed by the AI module when there are conflicts among the users of the metaverse. For example, in a metaverse-based game, there are likely to be competitions or fights; thus, arbitration is needed to judge who wins and who loses as well as determining the consequences. “Simulation” is another possible function provided by the AI module. For example, when a user grows plants or raises animals, there is the need for a simulation function to determine the status of the plants or animals as time passes. An even more important usage of the “simulation” function provided by AI technologies is that it enables the NPCs (Non-player characters) to act like humans in the metaverse. Of course, the AI module also needs to be able to make decisions following the rules pre-defined by the creator, such as determining the consequences when some events happen based on the pre-defined rules.