Roadmap toward the metaverse: An AI perspective

Truth must be told,but not much—a hybrid society of real and virtual is coming.Metaverse,1 rise recently,is attracting significant attention from academia to industry.A metaverse is a network of three-dimensional(3D)virtual worlds focused on social connection.Bearing the outbreak of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic,people are physically isolated,which triggered the growth of the metaverse.Different from existing work,this commentary targets the roadmap of the metaverse from an artificial intelligence(AI)perspective.First,we blueprint a roadmap for this digital cyberspace transformation,including immersion creation,hardware support,text interpretation,audio processing,connection construction,economy operation,and security protection.Second,at each phase of the roadmap,we address the status as well as the advanced technologies to provide indepth views accordingly.The whole pipeline is illustrated from an AI2 perspective,as shown in Figure 1,and we believe that AI is playing an increasingly important role in core techniques toward this technological singularity。