Multimedia Research Toward the Metaverse

Metaverse, a set of fully immersive digital worlds where people can interact with one another using three-dimensional (3-D) avatars, is poised to become an increasingly popular modality to communicate with others. Many in the space consider it an evolution of the Internet, with augmented and virtual reality headsets providing the hardware to both visualize and interact with it. However, creating custom 3-D content and environments for a digital world can be extremely time-consuming and costly compared to typical web pages. To this end, research in procedural content generation is required to empower the efficient creation of high-quality multimedia contents for the metaverse. One other core concern when creating a fully decentralized metaverse is the need to download relevant environments on demand as people traverse across different worlds. Further research by the multimedia community on efficient multimedia networking, storage, and compression is necessary to ensure that digital worlds remain easily accessible to others.