Quantum Semantic Communications for Metaverse: Principles and Challenges

The Metaverse is a connected virtual space that has recently emerged as a new frontier for human interaction and experiences. For ideal immersive Metaverse experiences, perpetual data traffic poses stringent requirements on computation latency, communication bandwidth, data privacy, and transmission delay. Semantic communication with machine learning provides a nascent paradigm shift from context-agnostic communication toward semantics-centric communication to address these underlying challenges simultaneously. However, classical limitations of this computing-intensive communication partially serve the purposes of semantic extraction, privacy protection, and data-driven processing for Metaverse applications. In this article, we investigate the potential benefits of incorporating quantum anonymous communication and variational quantum computing to develop quantum semantic communication that enables Metaverse users to interact with virtual environments more reliably and securely. Specifically, quantum embedding and quantum machine learning are employed to extract and encode semantic messages of classical data into quantum states on high-dimensional Hilbert spaces. These semantic quantum states are then anonymously teleported to the receiving party using the quantum teleportation protocol that exploits anonymous entanglement and broadcast. We detail this anonymous quantum semantic communication framework that fully capitalizes on unique quantum resources and properties for the Metaverse, including fundamental principles and deployment challenges.