When the Metaverse Meets Carbon Neutrality: Ongoing Efforts and Directions

TL;DR

This paper examines the environmental impact of the metaverse, analyzing its carbon footprint across core layers, reviewing green mitigation techniques, and proposing policies and metrics to promote carbon neutrality in virtual environments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of carbon issues in the metaverse, introduces the Carbon Utility indicator, and discusses future directions for greener metaverse development.

Findings

Estimated carbon footprints for metaverse layers.

Reviewed limitations of current green techniques.

Proposed the Carbon Utility (CU) metric.

Abstract

The metaverse has recently gained increasing attention from the public. It builds up a virtual world where we can live as a new role regardless of the role we play in the physical world. However, building and operating this virtual world will generate an extraordinary amount of carbon emissions for computing, communicating, displaying, and so on. This inevitably hinders the realization of carbon neutrality as a priority of our society, adding heavy burden to our earth. In this survey, we first present a green viewpoint of the metaverse by investigating the carbon issues in its three core layers, namely the infrastructure layer, the interaction layer, and the economy layer, and estimate their carbon footprints in the near future. Next, we analyze a range of current and emerging applicable green techniques for the purpose of reducing energy usage and carbon emissions of the metaverse, and discuss their limitations in supporting metaverse workloads. Then, in view of these limitations, we discuss important implications and bring forth several insights and future directions to make each metaverse layer greener. After that, we investigate green solutions from the governance perspective, including both public policies in the physical world and regulation of users in the virtual world, and propose an indicator Carbon Utility (CU) to quantify the service quality brought by an user activity per unit of carbon emissions. Finally, we identify an issue for the metaverse as a whole and summarize three directions: (1) a comprehensive consideration of necessary performance metrics, (2) a comprehensive consideration of involved layers and multiple internal components, and (3) a new assessing, recording, and regulating mechanism on carbon footprints of user activities. Our proposed quantitative indicator CU would be helpful in regulating user activities in the metaverse world.