Handbook of the Metaverse

The metaverse is sweeping the global thanks to its fundamentally innovative concepts of physical-virtual blended reality and years of industrial efforts on relevant hardware development. It is yet unclear what the metaverse is, what technologies it relies on, and what concern the society should care about since it is such a huge ecosystem with nearly unlimited possibilities. The book aims to provide a comprehensive study on the metaverse including its development and ecosystem, and detailed descriptions ofmultiple key technologies with their challenges and state-of-the-art solutions, finally conclude with several important societal issues the metaverse may raise including concerns and suggestions. The book targets at providing understandable introductions to varied aspects of the metaverse that may appearnew to common

audiences, and, deep insights into a number of key directions for related professionals.

The purpose of the book is to help readers better understand the concept and current status of metaverse while inspiring relevant readers or institutes to spot interesting and challenging topics to follow.

Professor Pan Hui is a Chair Professor of Computational Media and Arts and Director of the Centre for Metaverse and Computational Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and a Chair Professor of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas and Director of the HKUST-DT Systems and Media Lab, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

His research has been generously sponsored by Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft Research, and China Mobile. His other notable academic profile also includes the Nokia Chair in Data Science and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

He is an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of Academia Europaea, an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He is also a founding member of the INTERPOL Expert Group on Metaverse and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse.

Dr Peng Yuan Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aarhus University. He was a research associate professor at USTC from 2021 to 2023. He got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki, mainly funded by the EU Marie Curie ITN.

Dr. Zhou leads the XR Lab at Aarhus University, where his group works on exploring AI for XR in terms of immersive scene generation, understanding, and streaming. He has served as conference organizer/PC and journal reviewer for AAAI, IJCAI, MM, ISMAR, MobiCom, CHI Play, IEEE TDSC, TPDS, TMC, TWC, TIP, TITS, TCCN, etc.

Dr. Lik-Hang Lee received a PhD degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to joining ISE, he was an assistant professor with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland (2019-2020). Also, he was an awardee of the Hong Kong Awards for Industries (Creativity and Innovation) in 2021, due to his achievement of employing augmented reality systems in Hong Kong classrooms.

His research interests are to build and design various human-centric computing systems, specializing in augmented and virtual realities (AR/VR). Dr. Lee has published no fewer than 50 works in well-recognized journals, conferences, and magazines. He has served the research community at prestigious conferences and journals in recent years, such as AAAI, IJCAI, PERCOM, CHI, Multimedia, AAAI ICWSM, IMWUT, ACM CSUR, IEEE VR, etc.

Dr. Tristan Braud is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université Grenoble Alpes in 2016, following a Master of Engineering degree jointly awarded by Grenoble INP in France and Politecnico di Torino in Italy.

Dr. Braud leads the Extended Reality and Immersive Media Lab (XRIM Lab) at HKUST, where his research spans augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), the Metaverse, pervasive computing, and human-centered systems design. His work focuses on developing large-scale XR systems with user experience placed at their core.