Building the Metaverse: Design Considerations, Socio-Technical Elements, and Future Research Directions of Metaverse

Virtual worlds are progressing toward a holistic abstraction of the metaverse. While there is abundant literature and synthesis on virtual worlds and related constructs, the linkages between above scholarly work and the "metaverse" are scarce. This research study addresses this gap by focusing on three specific research pursuits: a comprehensive definition of the metaverse that subsumes virtual world literature and looks at the metaverse as a sociotechnical stack, exploring the design elements of the metaverse, and a synthesis of future research direction associated with metaverse. For achieving the above goals, a hybrid research methodology comprising bibliometric analysis and a rigorous qualitative analysis of case studies across four major metaverse players with varied end goals was employed. The interpretive qualitative analysis was further distilled by mapping the emergent themes to the theoretical lens of affordances. This work presents a novel framework of metaverse design, establishing theoretical linkages between the sociotechnical fabric and applications of the metaverse.