Metaverse has been one of the latest buzzwords to capture the tech industry’s imagination. Metaverse seamlessly integrates the real world with the virtual world and allows avatars to carry out rich activities including creation, display, entertainment, social, and trading. The avatars and products in Metaverse truly affect the physical world and even change the behaviors of people in the physical world through the influence of people’s thoughts, which has a profound social significance. For example, the economy of Metaverse refers to the economic behaviors (such as creation, exchange, and consumption) in the digital world. Those economic behaviors are the fundamental components of the digital economy. Thus, the development of the economic system can be viewed as one of the most representative components of Metaverse. In a public, fair, and self-organized world, the centralized economic system of the physical world cannot operate efficiently because of the high transaction volumes involved. Therefore, the economic system of Metaverse must be constructed in a decentralized manner such that the virtual assets of avatars could circulate and be traded efficiently in Metaverse. Moreover, as a mapping of the physical world, a mass of Metaverse user data with abundant privacy information is generated and gathered in the digital world. It is significant to design an efficient data management system and prevent privacy violations from creeping in as trying to create a personalized Metaverse experience.
Blockchain as a decentralized ledger without a central authority has drawn enormous attention in diverse application fields in recent years. It is highly expected that blockchain will bring a vast array of opportunities to the development of Metaverse technologies, and to trigger a new round of technological innovation and industrial transformation. On the other hand, the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought promising opportunities in overcoming the challenges of Metaverse’s development such as big data analytics, AI-generated content, and intelligence deployment. Consequently, the integration of AI and Metaverse technologies becomes a promising trend to promote the benign evolution of the blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse ecosystem.
Although the advent of blockchain and AI has spawned a large number of new technologies and applications, the fusion of blockchain and AI with Metaverse also poses several emerging research challenges. For example, the transaction volumes in the Metaverse system are much higher than in the physical world. Blockchain-based Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) enable avatars to generate content that can be traded with their digital certificates. Furthermore, the construction of a digital currency system for Metaverse is much more challenging since there have not been specific rules made for Metaverse.
Thus, it is necessary to design new mechanisms and algorithms for the blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse ecosystem and develop diverse Metaverse applications. To better support future Metaverse, this special section calls for new ideas, theories, designs, mechanisms, frameworks, and technologies. We seek to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to present their latest findings, advancements, and achievements in the field of blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse. Survey articles are also welcome. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse Applications
- Blockchain/AI-driven Ecosystem in Metaverse
- New Architectures for Blockchain/AI-based Metaverse
- Blockchain-enabled Incentive Mechanisms in Metaverse
- Blockchain/AI-enabled Operations and Maintenance in Metaverse
- Smart Contracts for Metaverse
- Fraud-Detection based on Blockchain/AI in Metaverse
- Data Analytics to Identify Malicious Behaviors in Metaverse
- Security and Privacy Issues in Blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse
- Decentralized and Collaborative AI for Metaverse
- Data Exchange and Task Scheduling between Blockchain/AI Systems and Metaverse
- Emerging Technologies and Applications for Metaverse
- Proof-of-Concept Blockchain/AI-empowered Metaverse: Experimental Prototyping and Testbeds
Important Dates
Submissions Due: 15 April 2023
Submission Guidelines
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the OJ-CS Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special-section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.
Guest Editors
Contact the guest editors at huanghw28@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
- Huawei Huang, Sun Yat-Sen University, China
- Jiawen Kang, Guangdong University of Technology, China
- Qinglin Yang, Sun Yat-Sen University, China
- Zehui Xiong, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
