Digital Preservation of Experiences in Virtual Worlds: Using Metaverse Worlds to Preserve VR Research Worlds

Over 20 years after Second Life's debut, marking the first metaverse concept, the term has evolved beyond a buzzword. Many virtual worlds now have mature APIs for various applications, imbuing the term with real meaning as more than just a marketing term for online virtual worlds. During this same period, the use of 3D worlds for academic research has become much more prevalent. These worlds tend to have very ethereal existences, exploring one area of human-computer interaction and not engineered in any way for longevity due to being built. This paper is part of a trilogy of short papers exploring this topic, aimed at different audiences. This middle paper is aimed at game developers and academics to start a discussion of how it could be possible to preserve research within metaverse platforms such as VRChat or built from the ground up for these platforms. Metaverse platforms, of course, can be just as ethereal, but in the future, if such platforms became mainstream, they would potentially still offer a longer period of accessibility. The paper reports on the recreation of a VR experience designed to explore the effect of immersive experiences on changing people's opinions on climate change, and a second VR experience was written just for this paper to explore the conversion process starting with an application. These examples are used to illustrate the process, and a performance test is conducted to show the impact of using the VRChat API, which from these tests, demonstrates it is not a significant bottleneck in terms of performance, could limit some UI interactions options for the researcher, and ultimately does create applications that could be easier to share with the community.