Track Information

Track: Metaverse

The term “Metaverse” was first introduced in 1992 by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel “Snow Crash”. Metaverse is a portmanteau consisting of “meta” (which means “beyond”), to capture the development of a virtual world beyond the physical reality, and “verse” (which refers to a back-formation from “universe”) to refer to a virtual utopia. Second Life, a multimedia game, was launched in 2003 and was considered as the most important application of Metaverse (or virtual world) at the time. Despite the great attention that Second Life attracted, Metaverse did not manage to create a critical mass possibly due to the novelty of the technology at the time and its lack of interoperability with other solutions.
Recently, the technological advancements in blockchain technology, the evolution of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), the technological progress in extended reality (virtual and augmented), the developments in other scientific fields like Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the convergence of all the above technologies have increased the popularity of Metaverse. We are still in the beginning of this new digital future and software vendors including Facebook and Microsoft have already launched their Metaverse plat. The fact that Facebook renamed its mother company to “Meta” shows how important Metaverse is in Facebook’s overall strategy.
It is expected that a new generation of Internet will evolve from Metaverse, built of technologies like extended reality, blockchain, and others. The dynamic of Metaverse is huge with many experts predicting that it will generate a multi-trillion market in the coming years. Despite the opportunities and the advantages that Metaverse may offer, there are many open challenges that need to be assessed and addressed including social, legal, ethical, technical, and others.
For these reasons, it is important for academics to systematically research this field at various levels. Conferences, with their fast turnaround, play a key role in disseminating knowledge about Metaverse due to the speed at which developments occur. The proposed track aims to bridge a gap at EMCIS and serve as a venue to share knowledge and discuss the latest developments in Metaverse.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Advanced topics in Metaverse
• AI and the Metaverse
• Avatars
• Brain-machine interfaces connect humans directly to computers
• Metaverse adoption and diffusion
• Metaverse and interoperability
• Metaverse applications and use cases (e.g. banking, fasjion, education, real estate etc)
• Metaverse business models
• Metaverse games
• Metaverse governance
• Metaverse impact on enterprises and public domain
• Metaverse interactivity technologies
• Metaverse security
• Metaverse societies
• Non-Fungible Tokens and their impact on Metaverse
• Open issues in the Metaverse
• Open Metaverse
• Social, legal and ethical challenges of Metaverse

Track chairs:
Marinos Themistocleous, University of Nicosia, Cyprus (email: Themistocleous.m@unic.ac.cy) 
Horst Treiblmaier, Modul University, Austria (email: horst.treiblmaier@modul.ac.at)