Caribbean Metaverse Development: A Literature Review Perspective

Abstract

The Caribbean’s metaverse evolution accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the metaverse, XR, and NFT and emphasises the Caribbean’s contribution to the virtual environment. A bibliometric analysis of metaverse-themed research identified the rapid increase in publications in 2021 and 2022 and that titles with XR (AR, VR or MR) occurred three times more than blockchain (including NFT). An evolving dataset was created based on a continuous scoping literature review of Industry 4.0 and its enabling technologies. This enables the creation of a new definition of the metaverse, understanding the UX benefits of XR and its applications' areas of foci, highlighting investment in XR-based projects, and illustrating the Caribbean-themed NFT and XR projects. This dataset revealed that UX benefits are linked to XR element features that are relevant, contextual, customised, hands-free and intuitive. It also revealed that XR applications have areas of foci that can enable machine control or data interface, designing and testing, remote support, education, customer engagement, remote collaboration or entertainment and escapism. Analysis of 54 XR papers revealed that the most popular area of focus was education (including training, learning and understanding). An evaluation of global investments in XR development showed funding ranged from USD 70K to USD 100M, and there needs to be focused financial support for Caribbean projects. This justifies continued research into factors influencing funding and encouraging Caribbean XR development. In addition, this research promotes regionally developed XR projects and NFTs. The paper's originality is the reductionist definition of the metaverse: a space designed for users by users, which can satisfy whomever, whatever, however, wherever and whenever. It manifests the user's extended reality, facilitated through XR technologies that enable Industry 4.0 (I4.0). As such, the metaverse can be considered the practical implementation of I4.0.