When Smart Metaverse Meets Affective Computing: Opportunities and Design Guidelines

Metaverse and affective computing are two promising areas. We envision a new generation of smart metaverse that will consider affective computing to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered avatars capable of expressing emotions and enhancing interactions on users' metaverse sessions. This article advocates for the symbiotic design of affective computing and metaverse. We discuss some of the unique challenges faced during the design of metaverse and affective computing and the current research trends to overcome them. We highlight how affective computing can tackle unique challenges in metaverse applications and how metaverse can be considered to deal with limitations faced in affective computing applications. Finally, we present some future research directions in need of attention.