Extended-XRI Body Interfaces for Hyper-Connected Metaverse Environments

Abstract

Hybrid mixed-reality (XR) internet-of-things (IoT) research, here called XRI, aims at a strong integration between physical and virtual objects, environments, and agents wherein IoT -enabled edge devices are deployed for sensing, context understanding, networked communication and control of device actuators. Likewise, as augmented reality systems provide an im-mersive overlay on the environments, and virtual reality provides fully immersive environments, the merger of these domains leads to immersive smart spaces that are hyper-connected, adaptive and dynamic components that anchor the metaverse to real-world constructs. Enabling the human-in-the-loop to remain engaged and connected across these virtual-physical hybrid environments requires advances in user interaction that are multi-dimensional. This work investigates the potential to transition the user in-terface to the human body as an extended-reality avatar with hybrid extended-body interfaces that can interact both with the physical and virtual sides of the metaverse. It contributes: i) an overview of metaverses, XRI, and avatarization concepts, ii) a taxonomy landscape for extended XRI body interfaces, iii) an architecture and potential interactions for XRI body designs, iv) a prototype XRI body implementation based on the architecture, v) a design-science evaluation, toward enabling future design research directions.