From the 1990s to the present, different cutting techniques have been developed to provide people with amazing virtual encounters in cyberspace. In this context, the term “metaverse,” which combines the words “meta” and “universe,” has been coined to describe a shared virtual environment powered by a variety of developing technologies, the most important being Artificial Intelligence.
The relevance of massive data processing in enhancing interactive experience and enabling humanlike intelligence in virtual agents has been demonstrated by AI. To develop scalable and realistic virtual worlds, the metaverse will combine augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) with artificial intelligence and blockchain. AI is a critical technology that works behind the scenes to create a beautiful and creative environment, providing consumers with a seamless virtual-reality experience. AI may help with content production as well. For example, certain AI modules, such as NVIDIA’s GANverse3D, allow developers and producers to take photographs of items and then create virtual duplicates. Several DL-based approaches for rendering 3D objects (including human body parts) have been presented, with amazing accuracy and realtime processing accelerated by both software and hardware.
This blog looks at state-of-the-art AI-based solutions in many technological areas such as natural language processing, machine vision, and blockchain, all of which have metaverse potential. As a result, users’ experiences in the metaverse are considerably enhanced, with virtually no distinction between the virtual and actual worlds.
NLP
In the metaverse, NLP is critical for intelligent virtual assistants. AI chatbots are intended to help users in virtual worlds such as the metaverse. Language modelling, which is beneficial for machine translation and text recommendation, is one of the most significant jobs in NLP. It predicts words or simple linguistic units by capturing syntactic and semantic relations of preceding words and units.
In most VR games, navigation is accomplished using handheld controllers, gestures, or eye tracking. To browse immersive areas like the metaverse, the user can use VR controllers to click a few buttons, move the joystick, scroll up/down, and so on. This experience now includes voice-based controls, thanks to NLP. We could say that NLP in the metaverse (or any other virtual environment) would provide VR users with a new way to provide inputs. For instance, when a player speaks into their microphone in a virtual reality game, a doorway opens. Because the Metaverse strives for a high level of realism in its recreations of real-world experiences, voice commands will be crucial.
DL has been used to overcome the learning shortcomings of traditional ML algorithms and effectively cope with a variety of difficult NLP jobs for the metaverse. Multiple sentence-based tasks, such as sentiment prediction and question type classification, are handled by CNNs with simple and advanced architectures. Furthermore, feature extraction of characteristics may be required for sentiment analysis and recognition tasks, which has the ability to boost the reliability and flexibility of virtual assistant units in the metaverse.
COMPUTER VISION
Computer vision and Extended Reality (XR) in cooperation are at the heart of the metaverse. The raw data perceived from visual environments (via optical display and video player) is captured and processed to infer high-level information, which is then shown to users over head-mounted devices and others, such as smart glasses and smartphones. Let’s dive deep into the role of these technologies in the progress of the metaverse.
- Extended Reality: VR headsets enable the viewing of 360-degree videos providing unlimited view-point in all directions that are suitable for VR performance. Some AI algorithms have been utilized in VR devices to improve the human-machine interaction experience based on visual-based information. For the prediction of user’s eye fixations in some gaze-based applications, such as content design and rendering, a DL framework with multiple CNNs was built to deal with various kinds of input data, e.g., VR image, gaze data, and head data. Neural networks are also adopted for human identification and authentication by analyzing periodic behaviors between users and VR gears (e.g., controllers and head-mounted display).
- Computer Vision: In the metaverse, players can control their avatars (virtual characters) and interact with other players or nonplayer characters (NPCs), with the help of motion-sensing interactive devices like controllers, gloves, and cameras, the posture and action of avatars should be estimated and recognized automatically. Some studies use the depth information received by depth cameras that has been learned together with colour information by sophisticated ML and DL models to increase the accuracy of body part localization and deal with different viewpoints. Picture quality reduction issues, such as noise, blurring, and low resolution, should be addressed in the virtual world to enhance users’ visual perception. Several image restoration projects use CNN architectures to remove image compression artifacts and recover clean pictures from a variety of sources.
BLOCKCHAIN
The blockchain mechanism has been widely accepted as a very secure way of storing data. This includes not only eliminating the concept of trust from systems via decentralisation, but also includes proper coordination in a decentralised network tracking changes to data. The large amount of data in the metaverse can be stored on a blockchain over a centralised data warehouse. The unique features of blockchain provide a promising solution for security and privacy. Introducing AI only empowers this system more.
Establishing Utility
Various traditional ML techniques (e.g., clustering, SVM, and bagging) as well as unique DL structures (e.g., CNN and LSTM) have been examined for data analytics in blockchain-based networks to detect and categorize cyberattacks. This includes evaluating smart contracts, and cost-efficient model learning in an on-chain environment. The use case of blockchain even extends to IOT frameworks which have also benefited from implementing AI for security. The framework below shows a high performance system on fraud detection and threat prediction, and can be extended for dealing with security and privacy problems in data storage and sharing instead of data collection.
With the ever increasing popularity of deep learning, traditional machine learning algorithms aren’t all we see in the blockchain space. A CNN based blockchain framework named Deepchain was recently developed to ensure the privacy and integrity of data contributed by the network participants.
Incorporating AI
One of the ways in which we can practically incorporate AI in blockchain is using Federated Learning. FL is a learning model in which multiple users learn a model based on their local data store and then collaborate to learn a global model. This collaborative learning is possible due to a parameter aggregation mechanism. While FL can offload the trained intrusion detection model to distributed edge devices, reducing the central server’s computational requirements, blockchain can ensure the aggregation model’s security in both the model storage and sharing processes. Interoperability, in addition to data security and privacy, is a key topic in blockchain since it allows multiple parties to interact utilising diverse data infrastructures. Using FL further increases the reliance on decentralised systems which is the primary way in which centralised trust is answered.
REAL WORLD APPLICATION
A. Healthcare:
By means of VR/XR systems, AI plays a vital role in many healthcare and medical sectors, for example, achieving better efficiency in providing diagnosis, delivering accurate and faster medical decisions, providing better realtime medical imaging and radiology, and supporting more convenient simulated environments to educate interns and medical students.
B. Manufacturing
By collaboratively adopting cutting edge technologies, such as AI and DT, the metaverse for manufacturing can significantly modernize digital operations in the current digital revolution. Through virtual entities in the metaverse, the industrial manufacturing efficiency is generally improved with AI to speed up production process design, motivate collaborative product development, reduce operation risk to quality control, and obtain high transparency for producer and customers.
C. Smart Cities
Several smart services, such as utility payment and smart home control, can be now executed in the virtual world via the platforms and systems deployed in the metaverse: such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), smart street light management systems, automatic parking systems, smart community portals, and indoor/outdoor video surveillance systems, etc.
D. Gaming
Gaming has always been a prime application in the metaverse, in which ML and DL are redefining and revolutionizing the gaming industry across multiple platforms, from console to mobile and PC platforms. To build more realistic worlds with attractive challenges and unique stories, video game developers and studios have been increasingly turning to ML as a powerful tool set that helps systems and Non-player characters to respond to player’s action dynamically and reasonably.
Article: AI in Metaverse