The Seven Worlds and Experiences of the Wireless Metaverse: Challenges and Opportunities

The wireless metaverse will create diverse user experiences at the intersection of the physical, digital, and virtual worlds. These experiences will enable novel interactions between the constituents (e.g., extended reality (XR) users and avatars) of the three worlds. However, remarkably, to date, there is no holistic vision that identifies the full set of these worlds, constituents, and experiences, and the implications of their associated interactions on next-generation communication and computing systems. In this article, we present a holistic vision of a limitless, wireless metaverse that distills the metaverse into an intersection of seven worlds and experiences that include the: physical, digital, and virtual worlds, along with the cyber, extended, live, and parallel experiences. We then articulate how these experiences bring forth interactions between diverse metaverse constituents, namely, humans and avatars and connected intelligence systems and digital twins (DTs). Then, we explore the wireless, computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) challenges that must be addressed to establish metaverse-ready networks that support these experiences and interactions. We particularly highlight the need for end-to-end synchronization of DTs, and the role of human-level AI and reasoning abilities for cognitive avatars. We conclude with a set of recommendations to deploy the limitless metaverse over future wireless systems.