This was a tutorial presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2025 conference in St. Malo, France.
Summary: While there is a lot of discussion about how to draw a boundary around what a metaverse is and is not, we assume that it is a shared virtual space blending digital and physical realities that is accessed through VR/AR or traditional devices. Users will use this virtual space to socialize or work collaboratively. We expect some people to use it for multiple hours in the day. This tutorial will explore how metaverse-like systems will be built and how they can be managed. In scaling up from today’s social virtual reality systems to those envisaged, we will encounter many technical and societal challenges. This tutorial will explore the areas of AI, ethics, legislation and technology to enable researchers to be aware of the issues and thus make a more informed impact on the future of the metaverse.
Background: The concept of the metaverse was first popularized in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, where the term described a shared digital world where users interact through avatars. Prototypes of metaverses can be seen in today’s social virtual reality applications. Millions of users are already engaging in socialisation and collaboration using a variety of platforms including consumer VR headsets. However, most of the current collaboration systems are effectively walled-gardens. There is little support for moving between different worlds supported by different platforms. There are good and bad technical reasons for this technical approach. Most commentators agree that at least some consolidation is necessary in order to create more accessibility for a variety of content developers and stakeholders to engage with the widest audiences possible. It also makes sense from a user point of view to have fewer interfaces and systems.
Thus the vision of the metaverse requires some significant technical developments. Artificial intelligence systems will make content development significantly easier. Tracking technologies will mean that representations of users might be richer and, optionally, more authentic. Hand in hand with technical development are the ethical and regulatory issues that will arise. While some of these are already apparent in reports of unsavoury and illegal behaviour already occurring in some platforms, with broader access and more inter-operation the need for proper regulation and associated enforcement is paramount.
In this tutorial, we explored these issues to sensitize the audience to some of the underlying problems, opportunities and prospective developments. This is to inform researchers of the non-obvious technical challenges, but also the role that ethics and regulation may have in shaping technical developments.
Topics and Materials
Anthony Steed – General Introduction and Lightning Guide to the Metaverse
Anthony Steed – Technical Challenges of the Metaverse
This will give a broad overview of the roles of different stakeholders in specifying how platforms and users will interact in future metaverses. By exploring the concepts of scalability and partitioning we will describe essential components of how metaverses could be built, and some of the technical challenges in ensuring a seamless (or at least usable and plausible) experience.
Doron Friedman – AI and the Metaverse
This section examines how AI safety and ethics challenges – particularly the ‘alignment problem’ – intersect with shared virtual reality environments and metaverse platforms. As AI systems grow more complex, ensuring they reliably act in accordance with human values becomes increasingly challenging. We’ll explore specific examples of these challenges in metaverse contexts, where AI agents interact with users in shared virtual spaces. We will discuss an emerging approach to addressing these ethical and safety considerations in multi-user XR environments.
Piotr Skrzypczynski – Machine Learning Technologies
This talk explores how ML enhances perception and decision making in AR/VR. We will talk about examples in rehabilitation, education, and industry, with a common technology background.
Marco Gillies – Embodied Interaction
Machine learning and AI technologies also enable new ways of interacting with virtual reality that mimic our embodied interaction with the world. It can be used to prototype and implement complex interaction methods that use our whole bodies. We will use two case studies: movement interaction that draws from contemporary dance, and interaction with virtual characters.
Raúl Ruiz Rodríguez- Regulatory Challenges of the Metaverse
An overview of the key regulatory challenges associated with virtual reality technologies from an EU perspective, focusing on the adaptation of existing frameworks (e.g., the DSA, the DMA) to virtual environments and platforms, as well as specific issues like intellectual property, avatars and digital identity, and personal data protection.
Dov Greenbaum . – Ethical and Social Aspects
Dov will speak on ethical and social aspects of building and regulating metaverses.
Presenter Bios
Anthony Steed (Prof) is Head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (https://wp.cs.ucl.ac.uk/anthonysteed/). He has over 25 years’ experience in developing effective immersive experiences. While his early work focussed on the engineering of displays and software, more recently it has focussed on user engagement in collaborative and telepresent scenarios. He received the IEEE VGTC’s 2016 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award. Recently he was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond and an Erskine Fellow at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Doron Friedman is an Associate Prof. in the Sammy Ofer School of Communications and the head of the Advanced Reality Lab (http://arl.runi.ac.il). His PhD thesis, carried out in Computer Science in Tel Aviv University, studied AI-based cinematography in virtual environments. He continued as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Lab at University College London, working on controlling highly immersive virtual reality by thought, using brain-computer interfaces. Since 2008 Prof. Friedman and his lab members have been involved in several national and international projects in the areas of telepresence, virtual reality, and advanced human computer interfaces. In the last few years the lab’s research has focused on integrating generative deep models, including large language models, into XR scenarios, with focus on mental health and fostering pro-social behavior.
Piotr Skrzypczynski, a graduate of Poznań University of Technology (PUT), obtained his doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in robotics from the same university in 1997 and 2007, respectively. He is the Head of the Robotics Division at the Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence of PUT, and deputy director at the Centre for AI and Cybersecurity. A leader in numerous national and European projects, he has authored over 180 papers. Active in mentoring young scientists, he also serves on editorial boards and conference committees. His research focuses on SLAM, autonomous navigation, machine perception, and machine learning in robotics and immersive technologies.
Marco Gillies is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-leads (with Xueni ‘Sylvia’ Pan) the Social Empathic and Embodied VR (SeeVR) research group. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement based interaction with VR. His work is highly interdisciplinary and includes applications and collaboration with fields such as dance and performance, medicine, education, games development, critical disability studies, developmental psychology and social neuroscience.
Raúl Ruiz Rodríguez is a Professor in the Private International Law Department at the University of Alicante. His Ph.D. research (concluded in October 2024) centered on the international protection of digital data through trade secrets, complemented by parallel studies on blockchain technology and collective actions. Currently, he is a member of the Academic Chair for the Responsible Development of the Metaverse at the University of Alicante. He is also part of the Global Innovation Law and Policy research group (GIP Law) at the same institution and served as a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law (2023 scholarship).
Dov Greenbaum is a lecturer in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale University. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies where they research the XR and Metaverse, among other emerging technologies. Dov teaches at the intersection of law and technology at Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University. He also teaches genetics and bioethics at the Dina Recanati School of Medicine. Dov has degrees and postdocs from Yale, Berkeley, Stanford and ETH Zurich. He is licensed to practice law in California and before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He is a certified privacy professional with IAPP.