The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Metaverse

We envision in the future the virtual world will mix and co-exist with the physical world in such an immersive way that we cannot tell what is real and what is virtual. We will live and interact with the virtual objects that are blended into our environments with advanced holographic technology or with high-quality head mounted displays and lose the virtuality boundary. We call such a new reality Surreality. Our vision of “metaverse” is a multi-world. There are multiple virtual worlds developed by different technology companies and there is also the Surreality where real and virtual merged. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital “big bang” of our cyberspace is not far away. This talk aims to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, illustrates the possibility of the digital “big bang”, and propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse. Reality will die; long live Surreality.