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When Internet of Things meets Metaverse: Convergence of Physical and Cyber Worlds
Kai Li, Yingping Cui, Weicai Li, Tiejun Lv, Xin Yuan, Shenghong Li, Wei Ni, Meryem Simsek, Falko Dressler
TL;DR
The paper addresses how IoT can provide immersive cyber-virtual experiences by connecting real-time physical-world data with the Metaverse. It surveys applications, enabling technologies, requirements, and open issues, concluding that these elements support eventual physical–cyber convergence.
Problem
The central problem is how to connect IoT-derived physical-world data with immersive AR/VR Metaverse experiences while addressing unresolved development challenges.
Method
The paper surveys six application areas and four pillar technologies: responsible AI, high-speed data communications, cost-effective MEC, and digital twins.
Results
The survey outlines seven requirements—immersion, variety, economy, civility, interactivity, authenticity, and independence—and identifies open issues for implementation.
Takeaways & Limitations
The surveyed technologies can bridge IoT applications and the Metaverse toward convergence of physical and cyber worlds.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) is studied in the context of the Metaverse to provide users immersive cyber-virtual experiences in mixed reality environments. This survey introduces six typical IoT applications in the Metaverse, including collaborative healthcare, education, smart city, entertainment, real estate, and socialization. In the IoT-inspired Metaverse, we also comprehensively survey four pillar technologies that enable augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), namely, responsible artificial intelligence (AI), high-speed data communications, cost-effective mobile edge computing (MEC), and digital twins. According to the physical-world demands, we outline the current industrial efforts and seven key requirements for building the IoT-inspired Metaverse: immersion, variety, economy, civility, interactivity, authenticity, and independence. In addition, this survey describes the open issues in the IoT-inspired Metaverse, which need to be addressed to eventually achieve the convergence of physical and cyber worlds.
I. INTRODUCTION
The IoT-inspired Metaverse connects physical-world data with AR/VR experiences across six application areas: healthcare, education, smart cities, entertainment, real estate, and socialization.
- IoT-enabled Metaverse: IoT maps real-time physical-world data into virtual reality and supplements AR/VR interfaces with sensed user states.Medical IoT devices can instrument health conditions that elicit responses in the virtual realm.
- Healthcare: Healthcare applications include remote telehealth consultations, accessibility support, surgical assistance, and psychotherapy.Telehealth availability among healthcare facilities rose from 43% before the pandemic to 95% in 2020.
- Education: AR/VR transforms education through visualization-based learning, immersive teaching environments, and safe virtual laboratories.Virtuali-Tee lets students examine the inside of the human body as if they were in an anatomy lab.
- Smart city: IoT-empowered digital twins digitize roads, buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure to create virtual cities for simulation and planning.They can capture people, vehicles, traffic lights, and buildings using IoT data.
- Entertainment and real estate: Entertainment uses VR and related technologies for immersive games and large virtual events, while real estate uses AR/VR for property tours and design.Roblox is described as having 150 million monthly active users, and virtual tours can eliminate customers’ travel time for inspections.
- Socialization: The Metaverse supports social interaction beyond physical time and space through virtual offices, dating, gatherings, and persistent participant presence.It enables people to participate together and simultaneously in diverse activities while maintaining an individual sense of presence.
B. Key contributions of this survey
The survey identifies four technologies supporting IoT-enabled Metaverse applications and explains how they address interpretability, latency, computation, and physical-world synchronization.
- Four pillar technologies: The survey comprehensively examines responsible AI, high-speed data communications, cost-effective MEC, and digital twins as four pillar technologies.Each technology is discussed with its motivation, significance, key technologies, and typical Metaverse applications.
- Responsible AI: Responsible AI makes otherwise black-box AI decision-making more understandable while accounting for ethical, moral, legal, cultural, and socio-economic consequences.It helps engineers and data scientists explain how algorithms produce specific Metaverse results.
- High-speed communications: Immersive AR/VR requires enormous data exchange and ultra-low latency, with haptic signals and human perception requiring latency of at most 1 ms.LTE wireless systems are described as allowing a minimum latency of 25 ms, limiting real-time communication with many IoT devices.
- Mobile edge computing: MEC places communications and computing resources near users to provide massive server capacity and ultra-low-latency responses for immersive 3D environments.Its response-time objective can approach or exceed the limits of human perception.
- Digital twins: Digital twins create synchronized digital replicas of physical products, processes, facilities, and services for visualization, simulation, and prediction.They integrate IoT, AI, and semantic communication through low-latency data collection, precise modeling, and two-way information flow.
II. EXISTING SURVEYS AND TUTORIALS
Prior surveys address Metaverse structures, applications, AI, blockchain, security, privacy, and related technologies; this survey instead centers on the IoT-empowered Metaverse and its open challenges.
- Recent studies: Existing surveys and tutorials cover Metaverse taxonomies, AR/VR, AI, blockchain, human-machine interaction, robotics, MEC, security, privacy, and ethics.They organize technologies by areas such as hardware, software, content, interaction, implementation, and applications.
- Recent studies: Prior work also studies blockchain-AI economic systems and 6G-assisted AI architectures for real-time interaction and resource allocation.The described 6G architectures include edge cloud-Metaverse, mobile edge cloud-Metaverse, and decentralized Metaverse.
- Research gap: This survey specifically maps real-time IoT data from the physical world into digital reality and provides a fine-grained study of four supporting technologies.Its focus is responsible AI, high-speed data communications, cost-effective MEC, and IoT-empowered digital twins.
- Research gap: The survey additionally discusses open issues spanning data processing, security and privacy, real-time 3D modeling, scalability, mobile experience, interoperability, and physical-world barriers.These issues are presented as challenges for further development of the IoT-empowered Metaverse.
III. INDUSTRIAL EFFORTS AND KEY REQUIREMENTS FOR ENABLING IOT WITH METAVERSE IN DAILY LIFE
The IoT-empowered Metaverse is framed as a persistent, accessible platform merging physical and virtual activities, with seven requirements shaping its development.
- Metaverse vision: The Metaverse spatially merges physical and virtual worlds in perceived real time, supporting persistent activities, identities, data, and experiences.Participants can conduct healthcare, education, office, social, trading, creation, and entertainment activities before returning to reality.
- Industrial efforts: The COVID-19 pandemic increased reliance on technology for entertainment, education, and socialization and heightened attention to immersive telepresence.Companies have developed avatar-based virtual worlds, gaming, conferencing, and social applications.
- Key requirements: The IoT-empowered Metaverse has seven requirements: immersion, variety, economy, civility, interactivity, authenticity, and independence.The paper presents these requirements as demanding further IoT technology development.
- Immersion: High immersion requires synchronous, persistent participation with individual presence and continuity of identities, entitlements, objects, history, communications, and payments.The requirement is intended to make Metaverse experiences resemble those of the physical world.
- Anywhere, anytime, any participant: The Metaverse is intended to support access anywhere and anytime for any participant, without location, time, or identity-count limits.Its decentralized access model allows participants to connect from anywhere with a simple device.
D. Fully Functioning Economy
The Metaverse is described as an autonomous parallel space with its own economy, civilization, interoperability, and creations spanning physical and virtual worlds.
- Creators can create, own, invest in, trade, and receive rewards for virtual assets or experiences within the Metaverse.
- Participants form communities and establish shared rules that support a distinct civilization in the Metaverse.
- Interoperability enables users to connect across users, platforms, operating systems, and accessible Metaverses while reusing digital assets and content.
- The Metaverse contains digital copies of the physical world alongside virtual creations in a parallel space closely connected to external reality.
2) Significance:
Responsible AI is presented as a pillar technology for making Metaverse AI understandable, auditable, and attentive to ethical, legal, cultural, and socioeconomic consequences.
- Responsible AI helps engineers explain how AI algorithms produce specific results in IoT applications.
- Responsible AI addresses the Metaverse’s black-box learning processes by supporting comprehension, retracing, and regulatory alignment.
- It considers ethical, moral, legal, cultural, and socioeconomic consequences while extending guidance on algorithmic limits and training data.
- Responsible urban innovation is characterized by sustainability, supporting long-term urbanization strategies.
- Explainable AI approaches strengthen control and oversight against adverse effects such as biased decision-making and social discrimination.
B. High-speed data communications
High-speed data communications support the Metaverse’s demanding AR/VR services by addressing ultra-low latency, high throughput, connectivity, and scalability requirements.
- AR/VR services require up to 1 ms latency for haptic signals and human perception, whereas LTE systems reach a minimum of 25 ms.
- 5G improves real-time IoT data exchange through technologies including mmWave, NOMA, and massive MIMO.
- 5G can provide 100 Mbps for IoT devices or mobile users and a 10–20 Gbps peak data rate.
- Compared with 4G, 5G provides a 10-time increase in network throughput, a 10x decrease in communication latency, and 100x gains in traffic capacity and network efficiency.
- 6G is studied for ultra-high data rates and lower latency using additional frequency bands, while THz communication targets 100 Gbps and 1millisecond latency.
- THz links face weather attenuation and severe propagation loss; a 10-meter link can suffer 100 dB loss.
4) Applications in Metaverse:
High-speed communications and MEC support immersive Metaverse applications by enabling remote collaboration, low-latency interaction, and efficient delivery of computing and video resources.
- Applications in Metaverse: High-speed communications enable remote virtual classes with streamed demonstrations, broader participation, and fewer barriers to synchronous learning.
- Applications in Metaverse: Engineers can jointly design products online using IoT data and AR/VR to create shared virtual 3D models.
- MEC: MEC addresses immersion requirements by placing communications and computing resources near users to reduce response times below human perceptible limits.
- MEC: MEC can fetch requested data from edge or cloud caches, video source servers, or synthesize it at the MEC server.
- MEC: MEC uses edge offloading and computing to divide expensive processing into subtasks and aggregate the completed results centrally.
- MEC: Edge caching stores popular field-of-view content near users to reduce computational cost and rendering latency.
- MEC: Federated learning protects privacy by aggregating locally trained user models without directly exposing private information.
4) Applications in Metaverse:
Digital twins and related Metaverse technologies connect physical-world entities, services, and processes with virtual representations. Their applications span immersive experiences, simulation, analytics, and industrial or commercial decision support.
- Digital twins: Digital twins support immersive shopping, data analytics, and simulations before costly commercial decisions.They combine digital replicas with physical products and services to represent real-world scenarios.
- Digital twins: Digital twins synchronize physical assets, processes, and operating systems with the real world for visualization, analysis, and prediction.They are central to interaction between physical and virtual worlds through IoT connections.
- Market development: The global digital twins market reached $6.75 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $96 billion in 2029, with a 40.6% CAGR.The cited forecast identifies NVIDIA’s new platform as a major driver and COVID-19 as restricting industry development.
- Market development: Automotive and transportation held the largest digital-twins end-user market share in 2021, while industrial and aircraft manufacturing each exceeded 20%.The passage attributes the leading share partly to AI advances and autonomous-vehicle development.
2) Significance:
Digital twins are software-based digital representations built from aggregated IoT data to mirror physical entities and predict their behavior. Their hierarchical forms and lifecycle uses support simulation, optimization, diagnostics, maintenance, and service improvement.
- Significance: Digital twins aggregate multiple IoT data streams into composite views that mimic physical objects and predict their movements and reactions.The digital representation is implemented as an encapsulated software object or model.
- Hierarchical architecture: Digital twins are classified by scale and inclusiveness as component, asset, system, and process twins.This hierarchy is illustrated in Figure 8 and linked to applications in Table IV.
- Hierarchical architecture: Component twins replicate performance-relevant parts, while asset twins combine component information to identify improvements and generate actionable insights.Replicating only important components can reduce redundancy and costs.
- Product lifecycle: Digital twins support virtual prototypes and predictive performance data during product ideation before physical prototypes are built.Forecast results can guide product improvements before investment in a physical prototype.
- Product lifecycle: Across development, digital twins enable process optimization, remote diagnostics, supply-chain optimization, predictive maintenance, and customized service improvement.These uses include identifying potential failures, troubleshooting remotely, optimizing production timing and routes, and using user data to improve experience.
V. OPEN ISSUES IN THE FUTURE IOT-EMPOWERED METAVERSE
An IoT-empowered Metaverse must address real-time data collection, heterogeneous data processing, interoperability, security, privacy, and trustworthy AI. These open issues arise from integrating dense IoT data, multiple platforms, shared virtual spaces, and sensitive user information.
- A. Data processing: Collecting comprehensive real-time IoT data about physical objects and procedures remains challenging for Metaverse applications.Required data include initial, monitoring, operational, business, and program information.
- A. Data processing: Spatial computing requires scalable, diverse, multimodal data management, including fusion, standardized semantics, storage, transmission, security, and privacy.Semantic representations can compress transmission information, reduce delay, and encrypt original data.
- B. Security and privacy: Integrating IoT devices and shared virtual spaces across companies or institutions creates coordination requirements and security and privacy concerns.Partners must coordinate and exchange data when different IoT systems are integrated.
- B. Security and privacy: Responsible AI can expose sensitive decision-making information, while poisoned data may affect model functions and cause Metaverse service failures.Attackers may use explanations to identify users and health conditions; inconspicuous poisoned data can have growing effects during training.
- B. Security and privacy: Human-machine interfaces require rigorous safeguards because dynamic environments make AI override decisions difficult and human judgments can be faulty.The stated risks include scripting errors, data-management lapses, and mistakes in model-training data.
- B. Security and privacy: Cyber-attacks and data storage are major deployment challenges for Metaverse applications, making interface cybersecurity important for long-term use.The Metaverse’s reliance on IoT data increases the importance of securing its interfaces.
C. Real-time 3D modeling
Real-time 3D modeling depends on high-throughput, low-latency communication and processing for synchronized AR/VR experiences. Scalability becomes more demanding as users and data exchanges increase, motivating advanced networks, cloud processing, and satellite connectivity.
- C. Real-time 3D modeling: AR/VR applications require at least 15–30 FPS, with 60 FPS ideal and 90 FPS a comfortable VR standard.Lower frame rates can make users feel dizzy, while communication delay directly affects streaming frame rates.
- C. Real-time 3D modeling: 4G averages around 50ms latency, whereas 5G can reduce communication delay to less than 10ms and support 90-FPS streaming.The passage connects lower latency with more comfortable immersive experiences.
- C. Real-time 3D modeling: Multiple users require highly synchronized AR/VR applications with low latency, implying network requirements beyond 5G or even 6G.Large-scale monitoring and real-time computing also increase cloud-capacity demands.
- C. Real-time 3D modeling: Metaverse scalability is constrained by growing bandwidth demands as more participants upload and download video, transaction, and other data.Millions of simultaneous users could increase these demands substantially.
- C. Real-time 3D modeling: Cloud processing can compensate for limited IoT-device graphics power, but AR/VR applications remain sensitive to delays as small as 30ms.Google Stadia is given as an example of cloud processing with streamed AR/VR output.
F. Interoperability and uniformity of virtual platforms
Interoperability and uniformity remain major challenges because current Metaverse platforms use differing API standards, platforms, and operating systems. Seamless access requires cross-platform techniques and broader hardware and software portability.
- Different API standards prevent current Metaverse platforms from exchanging data, restricting IoT applications’ access across service domains.
- Interoperability must span users and platforms, platforms with one another, and different operating systems.
- Spatial computing, distributed computing, and cross-cloud platforms are studied to support participation across locations, times, and users.
- Closed platforms and operating-system differences prevent the “anywhere, anytime and any participant” experience from being realized.
- Lightweight, portable, affordable hardware and diverse software and hardware experiences remain necessary for wider Metaverse adoption.
- The survey identifies interoperability and uniformity of virtual platforms, alongside data processing, security, privacy, and scalability, as open development issues.