Hype to hurdles: an exploration of metaverse barriers through grey influence analysis (GINA)

Purpose Today, the metaverse is gaining prominence as a virtual space for forthcoming technological transformation, but its mass adoption remains limited. Its widespread adoption is hindered by several barriers, which affects it integration in the daily use. The study aims to identify and rank the barriers by providing comprehensive insights into their interconnected influences. Design/methodology/approach Through the extensive literature review, 10 significant barriers were identified. Thereafter, the responses were gathered from 32 experts from academia and industry through a structured questionnaire. Later, grey influence analysis (GINA) was applied to rank the most significant barriers. Findings The findings reveal that privacy and security concerns, integration and interaction challenges and ethical and legal constraints are the top-ranked barriers. However, speed and cost constraints, tech-triggered health issues and environmental concerns were found to exert least influence. The GINA model further determines the cause-effect relationship among barriers by showing high-impact factors trigger cascading effects on other adoption challenges. Research limitations/implications This study's results are generalized, and they may differ across different sectors, industries and user demographics. Future research can work to examine longitudinal and sectoral variations in adoption behavior. Practical implications This study offers an advice to policymakers, platform developers and educators for addressing main issues like investing in privacy protection, digital literacy campaigns and inclusive policy framework to reduce the entry of barriers. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to apply GINA for the metaverse adoption by offering a systematic understanding of metaverse adoption barriers like how they influence each other. It gives a unique order of barrier influence, contributing a new systematic perspective to metaverse adoption research.