The concept of Metaverse has attracted a lot of attention in various fields and one of its important applications is health and treatment. The Metaverse has enormous potential to transform healthcare by changing patient care, medical education, and the way teaching/learning and research are done. The purpose of this research is to provide an introduction to the basic concepts and fundamental technologies of the Metaverse. This paper examines the pros and cons of the Metaverse in healthcare context and analyzes its potential from the technology and AI perspective. In particular, the role of machine learning methods is discussed; We will explain how machine learning algorithms can be applied to the Metaverse generated data to gain better insights in healthcare applications. Additionally, we examine the future visions of the Metaverse in health delivery, by examining emerging technologies such as blockchain and also addressing privacy concerns. The findings of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the applications of Metaverse in healthcare and its potential to revolutionize the delivery of medical services.

With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions.

The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution.

This work proposes a novel framework to dynamically and effectively manage and allocate different types of resources for Metaverse applications, which are forecasted to demand massive resources of various types that have never been seen before. Specifically, by studying functions of Metaverse applications, we first propose an effective solution to divide applications into groups, namely MetaInstances, where common functions can be shared among applications to enhance resource usage efficiency. Then, to capture the real-time, dynamic, and uncertain characteristics of request arrival and application departure processes, we develop a semi-Markov decision process-based framework and propose an intelligent algorithm that can gradually learn the optimal admission policy to maximize the revenue and resource usage efficiency for the Metaverse service provider and at the same time enhance the Quality-of-Service for Metaverse users. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed approach can achieve up to 120% greater revenue for the Metaverse service providers and up to 178.9% higher acceptance probability for Metaverse application requests than those of other baselines.

The concept of the Metaverse aims to bring a fully-fledged extended reality environment to provide next generation applications and services. Development of the Metaverse is backed by many technologies, including, 5G, artificial intelligence, edge computing and extended reality. The advent of 6G is envisaged to mark a significant milestone in the development of the Metaverse, facilitating near-zero-latency, a plethora of new services and upgraded real-world infrastructure. This paper establishes the advantages of providing the Metaverse services over 6G along with an overview of the demanded technical requirements. The paper provides an insight to the concepts of the Metaverse and the envisaged technical capabilities of 6G mobile networks. Then, the technical aspects covering 6G for the development of the Metaverse, ranging from validating digital assets, interoperability, and efficient user interaction in the Metaverse to related security and privacy aspects are elaborated. Subsequently, the role of 6G technologies towards enabling the Metaverse, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, open radio access networks, edge computing, cloudification and internet of everything. The paper also presents 6G integration challenges and outlines ongoing projects towards developing the Metaverse technologies to facilitate the Metaverse applications and services.

The Metaverse can be considered the extension of the present-day web, which integrates the physical and virtual worlds, delivering hyper-realistic user experiences. The inception of the Metaverse brings forth many ecosystem services such as content creation, social entertainment, in-world value transfer, intelligent traffic, healthcare. These services are compute-intensive and require computation offloading onto a Metaverse edge computing server (MECS). Existing Metaverse edge computing approaches do not efficiently and effectively handle resource allocation to ensure a fluid, seamless and hyper-realistic Metaverse experience required for Metaverse ecosystem services. Therefore, we introduce a new Metaverse-compatible, Unified, User and Task (UUT) centered artificial intelligence (AI)- based mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm, which serves as a concept upon which future AI control algorithms could be built to develop a more user and task-focused MEC.

Semantic communication (SemCom) and edge computing are two disruptive solutions to address emerging requirements of huge data communication, bandwidth efficiency and low latency data processing in Metaverse. However, edge computing resources are often provided by computing service providers and thus it is essential to design appealingly incentive mechanisms for the provision of limited resources. Deep learning (DL)- based auction has recently proposed as an incentive mechanism that maximizes the revenue while holding important economic properties, i.e., individual rationality and incentive compatibility. Therefore, in this work, we introduce the design of the DLbased auction for the computing resource allocation in SemComenabled Metaverse. First, we briefly introduce the fundamentals and challenges of Metaverse. Second, we present the preliminaries of SemCom and edge computing. Third, we review various incentive mechanisms for edge computing resource trading. Fourth, we present the design of the DL-based auction for edge resource allocation in SemCom-enabled Metaverse. Simulation results demonstrate that the DL-based auction improves the revenue while nearly satisfying the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints.

Metaverse is expected to emerge as a new paradigm for the next-generation Internet, providing fully immersive and personalised experiences to socialize, work, and play in self-sustaining and hyper-spatio-temporal virtual world(s). The advancements in different technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G/6G communication will be the key enablers behind the realization of AI-XR metaverse applications. While AI itself has many potential applications in the aforementioned technologies (e.g., avatar generation, network optimization, etc.), ensuring the security of AI in critical applications like AI-XR metaverse applications is profoundly crucial to avoid undesirable actions that could undermine users' privacy and safety, consequently putting their lives in danger. To this end, we attempt to analyze the security, privacy, and trustworthiness aspects associated with the use of various AI techniques in AI-XR metaverse applications. Specifically, we discuss numerous such challenges and present a taxonomy of potential solutions that could be leveraged to develop secure, private, robust, and trustworthy AI-XR applications. To highlight the real implications of AI-associated adversarial threats, we designed a metaverse-specific case study and analyzed it through the adversarial lens. Finally, we elaborate upon various open issues that require further research interest from the community.

Will we see growth in the metaverse similar to the World Wide Web back in the 1990s? One source shows that there were fewer than 3,000 websites in 1994, but just five years later, there were more than 3 million, and being "on the web" was essential to many businesses. The internet's growth in the 1990s was fueled by rapid technological changes, growing customer expectations, and evolving business models, among other factors. It required a radical shift in IT functions, and during the past two decades just about all businesses came to need software development, integration, data, analytics, customer experience, automation, and e-commerce capabilities to remain solvent. The question is, which businesses will require a similar transformation to support the metaverse?

The metaverse is one of the hottest buzzwords in tech, and this far-reaching vision of a next-gen internet will rely upon an entire ecosystem of companies to make it a reality. We cut through the noise to explain what the metaverse is, how it's being built, and who's building it. The business world is obsessed with "the metaverse": the concept of shared worlds driven by virtual products and digital experiences that are highly immersive and interactive. We already have virtual worlds featuring live concerts and online games where players spend hundreds of hours -- but metaverse enthusiasts see a future where entire societies thrive in an online realm inhabited by avatars of real people. While the space is still in early days, the longer-term implications may not be trivial. Some users -- especially younger ones -- may eventually earn, spend, and invest most of their money in digital worlds. The metaverse could represent a $1T market by the end of the decade, according to CB Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus. This dollar potential has caught the attention of players across industries.