Digital Twin & Blockchain: Technology Enablers for Metaverse Computing

The Metaverse has been recently envisioned as the next technological revolution with the idea of building fully immersive virtual worlds where users can interact with each other and with mixed-reality environments and objects. The relationship between the digital and the physical worlds represents a challenging opportunity to foster the idea that virtual experiences and interactions can complement and enhance reality enabling the definition of new use cases and services. In this context, Metaverse’s technologies need to rely on a connected, trustworthy, and highly detailed digital representation of users and objects to build an effective virtual world based on trusted and fresh information from the physical world. The need to decouple responsibilities through a multi-layered vision allows Metaverse’s applications to focus only on their business goal by relying on a cyber-physical layer enabling bi-directional communication with users and devices, accessing trusted information, invoking available actions, and retrieving immutable historical data. In this paper, we analyze and propose the combination of Digital Twins and Blockchain technologies as strategic pillars for bridging the gap between the virtual and the physical worlds and supporting the creation of the Metaverse.