IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023 - 17

Column: Metaverse
Metaverse Meets
Consumer Electronics
Haiwei Dong
Huawei Technologies Canada
& THE FIRST YEAR of the Metaverse Era is considered
2021 mainly because the gaming company
Roblox was listed on March 10, 2021. Different
from the traditional games, in the Roblox metaverse,
the game players can construct their own
games to let others play together.
In October 2021, Facebook's parent company
was rebranded Meta Platforms, which further
boosted metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg announced
Meta's vision of metaverse called Horizon in which
users can throw parties, buy/sell houses and cars,
open concerts, customize the clothes of users' avatars,
and design different environments for home
andworking offices. He believes the aforementioned
immersive interaction would completely change
human life in the future.
Following Meta, Microsoft announced its hybrid
collaboration platform Mesh. Nvidia announced
Omniverse, which aims to realize highly productive
remote work throughmetaverse.Currently, themost
immediate emerging products inmetaverse are considered
tobegamingandcooperativeworking.
The dominant companies in metaverse have different
advantages in jumping into the metaverse
area: Epic's Unreal Engine renders a high-fidelity 3D
virtual environment; Meta's Quest VR (virtual
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2022.3229180
Date ofpublication 14 December 2022; date ofcurrent
version 8 April 2023.
Yang Liu
Magic Leap Canada
reality) headsets provide users with a fully immersive
environment to interact; Microsoft's HoloLens
MR (mixed reality) headsets enable the users to
overlay the virtual objects onto the real environment
and interact with real-world through gesture
vocabulary, speech recognition, etc.
EVOLUTION OF THE METAVERSE
Nowadays, different technical giants are separately
promoting their own metaverses resulting in
" islands " of decentralized, multicentered metaverse
systems. Although users join different metaverses,
respectively, their virtual assets and
customer data are not shared between the metaverses.
In order to build a unified fully connected
metaverse ecosystem, the standards of the metaverse
aswell as corresponding communication protocols
are highly required as shown in Figure 1. In
this regard, NVIDIA Omniverse is one of the pioneers,
which integrates digital models across
multiple metaverse systems through its opensource
file format and framework Universal Scene
Description. Furthermore, it provides the capability
to build and render different 3D scenes and assets
for different metaverse systems, and deploy them
to a variety of eXtended reality devices remotely.
Additionally, Khronos Group builds an open
standard named OpenXR for developing applications
running on anymajor eXtended reality devices
and platforms through a unifying application
May/June 2023
Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society
2162-2248 ß 2022 IEEE
17
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023
