When Creators Meet the Metaverse: A Survey on Computational Arts

TL;DR

This survey explores how computational arts are evolving within the metaverse, highlighting new creative forms, building elements, and future research directions for artists and technologists in virtual-physical blended realities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of computational arts in the metaverse, covering key topics, novel artworks, and proposing research agendas for future development.

Findings

Identification of key building elements for metaverse arts

Examples of immersive and robotic artworks in virtual spaces

Proposed research agendas for privacy, ownership, and technological challenges

Abstract

The metaverse, enormous virtual-physical cyberspace, has brought unprecedented opportunities for artists to blend every corner of our physical surroundings with digital creativity. This article conducts a comprehensive survey on computational arts, in which seven critical topics are relevant to the metaverse, describing novel artworks in blended virtual-physical realities. The topics first cover the building elements for the metaverse, e.g., virtual scenes and characters, auditory, textual elements. Next, several remarkable types of novel creations in the expanded horizons of metaverse cyberspace have been reflected, such as immersive arts, robotic arts, and other user-centric approaches fuelling contemporary creative outputs. Finally, we propose several research agendas: democratising computational arts, digital privacy, and safety for metaverse artists, ownership recognition for digital artworks, technological challenges, and so on. The survey also serves as introductory material for artists and metaverse technologists to begin creations in the realm of surrealistic cyberspace.