Task-Oriented Metaverse Design in the 6G Era

TL;DR

This paper explores the foundational infrastructure, development roadmap, and a novel task-oriented design methodology for creating a versatile, efficient, and synchronized Metaverse in the 6G era, supported by a practical case study.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive infrastructure framework, a staged development roadmap, and a task-oriented design approach with a case study using deep reinforcement learning for synchronization.

Findings

Proposed a three-pillar infrastructure model for the Metaverse.

Outlined a four-stage roadmap for Metaverse development.

Developed a prototype demonstrating task-oriented synchronization using deep reinforcement learning.

Abstract

As an emerging concept, the Metaverse has the potential to revolutionize the social interaction in the post-pandemic era by establishing a digital world for online education, remote healthcare, immersive business, intelligent transportation, and advanced manufacturing. The goal is ambitious, yet the methodologies and technologies to achieve the full vision of the Metaverse remain unclear. In this paper, we first introduce the three infrastructure pillars that lay the foundation of the Metaverse, i.e., human-computer interfaces, sensing and communication systems, and network architectures. Then, we depict the roadmap towards the Metaverse that consists of four stages with different applications. To support diverse applications in the Metaverse, we put forward a novel design methodology: task-oriented design, and further review the challenges and the potential solutions. In the case study, we develop a prototype to illustrate how to synchronize a real-world device and its digital model in the Metaverse by task-oriented design, where a deep reinforcement learning algorithm is adopted to minimize the required communication throughput by optimizing the sampling and prediction systems subject to a synchronization error constraint.