Web3 Metaverse: State-of-the-Art and Vision

Hongzhou Chen (1, 2) , Haihan Duan (1, 2) , Maha Abdallah (3) , Yufeng Zhu (4) , Yonggang Wen (5) , Abdulmotaleb El Saddik (2, 6) , Wei Cai (1)

1 The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
2 MBZUAI - Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
3 SMA - Systèmes Multi-Agents
4 Meta Reality Labs
5 Nanyang Technological University [Singapour]
6 Multimedia Communication Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa

The metaverse, as a rapidly evolving socio-technical phenomenon, exhibits significant potential across diverse domains by leveraging Web3 (a.k.a.Web3.0) technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and non fungible tokens (NFTs). This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Web3 metaverse from a human-centered perspective. We (i) systematically review the development of the metaverse over the past 30 years, highlighting the balanced contributions from its core components: Web3, immersive convergence, and crowd intelligence communities, (ii) define the metaverse that integrates the Web3 community as the Web3 metaverse and propose an analysis framework from the community, society, and human layers to describe the features, missions, and relationships for each community and their overlapping sections, (iii) survey the state-of-the-art of the Web3 metaverse from identity, field, and behavior aspects, and (iv) provide supplementary technical reviews. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first systematic, interdisciplinary survey on the Web3 metaverse. Specifically, we commence by discussing the potential for establishing decentralized identities (DID) utilizing mechanisms such as profile picture (PFP) NFTs, domain name NFTs, and soulbound tokens (SBTs). Subsequently, we examine land, utility, and equipment NFTs within the Web3 metaverse, highlighting interoperable and full on-chain solutions for existing centralization challenges. Lastly, we spotlight current research and practices about individual, intra-group, and inter-group behaviors within the Web3 metaverse, such as Creative Commons Zero license (CC0) NFTs, decentralized education, decentralized science (DeSci), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). Furthermore, we share our insights into several promising directions, encompassing three key socio-technical facets of the Web3 metaverse development.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Hongzhou Chen, Haihan Duan, Maha Abdallah, Yufeng Zhu, Yonggang Wen, et al.. Web3 Metaverse: State-of-the-Art and Vision. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, In press. ⟨hal-04252651⟩