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Top1. Introduction
The expanding ecosphere of the web and internet platforms known as “the metaverse” has become an essential aspect of modern cyberculture. The metaverse, which represents a new paradigm, is made up of virtual worlds created using technologies for extended reality (XR), mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR) (Alduailij et al. 2022; Alsharif et al. 2022), and augmented reality (AR) (Dolata & Schwabe, 2023; Kumar et al., 2022). When one thinks of the metaverse, which is still more of a concept than an actual enterprise application, one may think of the virtual worlds of video games. As time has progressed, this conceptualization of the metaverse has also progressed, both in the digital and physical realms. Users no longer have to just stare at their computer screens; they can now fully immerse themselves using headphones, gloves, headsets, or even full bodysuits. This opens up avenues for value creation in the spheres of business, society, and humanitarian causes. To realize the full potential of the metaverse, businesses and organizations need to go beyond simply transposing present reality into the virtual world. Creating this value necessitates an objective and tangible understanding of the metaverse and its elements. From an information system (IS) perspective, this can be viewed as delineating the elements of the metaverse stack.
The metaverse can be viewed as the inevitable outcome of technological advances from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to where we are now, with the advent of Web 3.0 or the Spatial Web (What is Web 3.0?, 2019), where people, spaces, and things, both digital and physical, are semantically intertwined. Socioeconomic activities will flourish in the metaverse, creating value by establishing on-and-off ramps between physical and digital assets.
The true value of the metaverse may entail disruptive rather than incremental changes. For example, accessing the metaverse will involve embracing new gateway interfacing devices, such as AR, MR, and VR glasses, haptic wearables, or even brain–computer interaction systems. We are likely to create and hold more value in digital assets than in physical goods. This is more than just comparing virtual products to their physical counterparts. For example, a digital Gucci Dionysus Bag was sold for more than USD 4,000, a retail price much higher than that of its physical counterpart (TFL, 2021). The metaverse is a distinct sociotechnical phenomenon (Sarker et al., 2019) that now exists in different academic and popular discourses. First, it is built on the complex set of technologies that we call the Internet, and to see complex 3D worlds, one needs a lot of computing power. Second, these worlds need to fit a likewise complex social system that participates in and actively shapes this world. These characteristics—instrumental and humanistic—cannot be defined in terms of conventional IS elements. Conventional ISs represent some real-world phenomenon, augment a physical device, or constitute a game in which some player pursues some goal. The metaverse builds on the confluence and integration of varied immersive social experiences that move beyond the physical limitations of what we commonly perceive to be the real world, and it is likely to play an important role in a variety of social activities and economic transactions (Turel & Qahri‐Saremi, 2022). It is not simply the next generation of video games or a new type of VR but needs to be understood as a novel IS that beckons further theoretical understanding and exploration.
Our research is not limited to understanding how the confluence of emerging technologies and human interactions with these technologies are shaping and will shape individuals’ perceptions and behaviors in this XR. Rather, its objective is to go a step further by informing the design of the metaverse in terms of the design and sociotechnical elements and, in so doing, arrive at a sociotechnical framework for metaverse design. With this aim, our key research questions are as follows: