🤖 AI Summary
Current metaverse research predominantly emphasizes commercial applications, neglecting societal value and public-interest orientations. Method: This paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of the “Societally Beneficial Metaverse” (SB-Metaverse), proposing a layered architecture grounded in inclusivity, trustworthiness, and sustainability. It integrates VR, digital twin technology, blockchain, edge computing, and AI-driven collaborative modeling to establish a secure, scalable, and auditable distributed virtual infrastructure. Contribution/Results: We formulate a technology roadmap and application paradigm for SB-Metaverse deployment in public domains—including education, healthcare, and industrial digital twins—and systematically identify and analyze six critical challenges: ethical governance, interoperability, energy efficiency bottlenecks, data sovereignty, scalability under heterogeneity, and long-term sustainability. These findings provide both theoretical foundations and actionable implementation pathways for policymakers and industry stakeholders.
📝 Abstract
In recent years, the maturation of emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality, Digital twins, and Blockchain has accelerated the realization of the metaverse. As a virtual world independent of the real world, the metaverse will provide users with a variety of virtual activities that bring great convenience to society. In addition, the metaverse can facilitate digital twins, which offers transformative possibilities for the industry. Thus, the metaverse has attracted the attention of the industry, and a huge amount of capital is about to be invested. However, the development of the metaverse is still in its infancy and little research has been undertaken so far. We describe the development of the metaverse. Next, we introduce the architecture of the socially beneficial metaverse (SB-Metaverse) and we focus on the technologies that support the operation of SB-Metaverse. In addition, we also present the applications of SB-Metaverse. Finally, we discuss several challenges faced by SB-Metaverse which must be addressed in the future.
