Call for Papers

Immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, and MR), which are often referred to as a universal term - extended reality (XR), have enabled numerous appealing applications in education, training, entertainment, healthcare, etc. While recent research on immersive computing and communication has focused mainly on improving the quality of experience for single-user scenarios, the emerging applications enabled by XR, especially the burgeoning Metaverse, naturally involve multiple geographically distributed users. Although there is still no commonly agreed definition, a narrow illustration of the Metaverse is a utopian convergence of various virtual environments, by connecting them via the Internet to facilitate social interaction among users. Thus, social VR platforms such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds and Microsoft’s AltspaceVR have been deemed as the early prototypes of the Metaverse. Besides social VR, the industry has been heavily investing in multi-user XR/Metaverse for creating novel hardware, software, and content. For example, the Metaverse Standards Forum has been formed in 2022 with members including tech giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Other existing standards organizations such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have created working groups for XR. However, there is still limited research on understanding the technical challenges and opportunities for boosting the performance of multi-user XR and the Metaverse by leveraging recent advances in deep learning, edge computing, 5G, etc. For example, there is no software framework with commonly used building blocks for designing and implementing multi-user XR systems, and there is a lack of widely acceptable tools and datasets for building and testbeds for evaluating multi-user XR applications. Moreover, given its interdisciplinary nature, XR has been extensively investigated in computer graphics, computer vision, and human-computer interaction communities.  Nonetheless, multi-user XR and the Metaverse put more strain on the underlying networks to deliver high-quality immersive content in real-time and guarantee a satisfactory user experience, which is still underexplored in the networking community.

This Special Issue is motivated by the above-mentioned issues, and its goal is to bring together researchers, engineers, practitioners, mobile device manufacturers, use case owners, content creators, and policymakers from academia, industry, and government to discuss the latest research and identify future opportunities for multi-user XR and the Metaverse. To inspire more fundamental research for this promising field, we seek high-quality original research, novel developments that promote innovations, or review articles to advance multi-user XR and the Metaverse. The submission should be comprehensible to all readers of the magazine regardless of their specialty.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• 5G/6G and beyond for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Deployment challenges of multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Edge computing, digital twins, and IoT for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• End-to-end evaluation of multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Split processing, scheduling, dynamic reconfiguration of networks and applications
• High-performance and scalable rendering for multi-user VR
• Latency and throughput optimization for multi-user VR, AR, and MR
• Machine learning, data science, and blockchains for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Metrics, tools, and testbeds for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Modeling, algorithms, and theories for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Multi-user spatial synchronization in AR/MR
• Multi-user 6DoF pose prediction
• Multi-user XR and applications in education, entertainment, healthcare, training, etc.
• Scalability and heterogeneity of multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• SDN and NFV (e.g., O-RAN) for the Metaverse
• Security and privacy in multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Standardizations for multi-user XR and the Metaverse
• Harassment detection and prevention in the Metaverse
• Quality of user experience in multi-user XR and the Metaverse

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the "Information for Author" section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select “May 2023/Metaverse” from the drop-down menu of Topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 22 December 2022 (Extended Deadline)
Initial Decision Notification: 15 February 2023
Revised Manuscript Due: 15 March 2023
Final Decision Notification: 31 March 2023
Final Manuscript Due: 10 April 2023
Publication Date: May/June 2023

Guest Editors

Bo Han (Lead)
George Mason University, USA

Tristan Braud
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China

Mario Di Francesco
Aalto University, Finland

Maria Gorlatova
Duke University, USA

Luyang Liu
Google Research, USA

Gábor Sörös
Nokia Bell Labs, Hungary

Pengyuan Zhou
University of Science and Technology of China, China