Edge-Enabled Metaverse: The Convergence of Metaverse and Mobile Edge Computing

Metaverse is a virtual environment where users are represented by their avatars to navigate a virtual world having strong links with its physical counterpart. The state-of-the-art Metaverse architectures rely on a cloud-based approach for avatar physics emulation and graphics rendering computation. The current centralized architecture of such systems is unfavorable as it suffers from several drawbacks caused by the long latency of cloud access, such as low-quality visualization. To this end, we propose a Fog-Edge hybrid computing architecture for Metaverse applications that leverage an edge-enabled distributed computing paradigm. Metaverse applications leverage edge devices' computing power to perform the required computations for heavy tasks, such as collision detection in the virtual universe and high-computational 3D physics in virtual simulations. The computational costs of a Metaverse entity, such as collision detection or physics emulation, are performed at the device of the associated physical entity. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we simulate a distributed social Metaverse application. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture can reduce the latency by 50% when compared with cloud-based Metaverse applications.