The bibliometric analysis, definition, framework, and human-centered survey of Web3 metaverse

What is it about?

The metaverse, as a rapidly evolving socio-technical phenomenon, exhibits significant potential across diverse domains by leveraging Web3 (a.k.a. Web 3.0) technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Web3 metaverse from a human-centered perspective. We systematically review the metaverse’s industrial (data from Dow Jones Factiva database) and academic (data from Google Scholar website) developments over the past 30 years, highlighting the balanced contributions from its core components: Web3, immersive convergence, and crowd intelligence communities. Our review also reveals that although the public often considers Facebook’s name change to Meta in 2021 and its promotion of VR products as critical indicators of the metaverse development, the Web3 community most prompted the metaverse’s rapid growth after 2018. Subsequently, the metaverse diversified globally with the participation of the Web3 community. The evolution of cognitions with the metaverse displays that the metaverse concept transcends the boundaries of virtual gaming. Its essence does not reside in the utilization of VR or AR technologies to “view” the virtual world, but rather in how we communicate, work, and engage within this parallel society, emphasizing a different form of immersion, namely social immersion. Therefore, we emphasize its decentralized traits introduced by the Web3 technology and define the Web3 metaverse as: A decentralized, closed-loop society system that utilizes Web3 technologies for distribution and exchange, granting users increased autonomy and control over their digital assets, experiences, and relationships. This system promotes social progress by integrating Web3 technologies with content creation technologies at the production and immersive technologies at the consumption. After defining the Web3 metaverse, we provide the framework that reveals how the metaverse emerges from integrating three distinct communities that jointly weave the multi-dimensional structure. Their cooperative interactions amplify the metaverse, nurturing a richer ecosystem, including: “social immersion,” “creator economy,” and “multimodal creation,” for which we give detailed descriptions of their concepts and dynamics. Based on the framework, we survey the state-of-the-art of the Web3 metaverse from identity, field, and behavior aspects, and provide supplementary technical reviews.

Featured Image

Photo by Shubham's Web3 on Unsplash

Photo by Shubham's Web3 on Unsplash

Why is it important?

To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first systematic, interdisciplinary survey on the Web3 metaverse. Specifically, we commence by discussing the potential for establishing decentralized identities (DID) utilizing mechanisms such as profile picture (PFP) NFTs, domain name NFTs, and soulbound tokens (SBTs). Subsequently, we examine land, utility, and equipment NFTs within the Web3 metaverse, highlighting interoperable and full on-chain solutions for existing centralization challenges. Lastly, we spotlight current research and practices about individual, intra-group, and inter-group behaviors within the Web3 metaverse, such as Creative Commons Zero license (CC0) NFTs, decentralized education, decentralized science (DeSci), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). Furthermore, we share our insights into several promising directions, encompassing three key socio-technical facets of Web3 metaverse development: integrating social and technical disciplines, leveraging and going beyond “code is law”, and tackling the monopoly issue.