PSI - Issue 64

L. Cecere et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 64 (2024) 2189–2196 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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immersion by allowing psychological and emotional involvement. Ubiquity refers to the accessibility of virtual spaces, that is, to be considered a viable tool, the Metaverse must be accessible from different devices and any area must be able to be explored by the user. Interoperability refers to that which allows the creation and movement of objects and user without interruption within the system. Finally, scalability is a feature related to the efficiency of the system regardless of the number of users (Lee et al., 2022). That of the Metaverse, then, is a complex and evolving structure that as such requires a careful and flexible approach in its design and configuration. Consideration must be given, for example, to the specific goals and intended uses of the virtual space: it is intended primarily for play and entertainment purposes, its structure might be designed to foster immersion and interactivity; if, on the other hand, it is designed for educational or professional purposes, specific tools and features might need to be integrated to foster collaboration, training and knowledge exchange(Casillo et al., 2024). The configuration of the metaverse must also consider users ’ needs and preferences, ensuring an intuitive and engaging user experience(Dozio et al., 2022). This translates into designing intuitive user interfaces, customizing virtual experiences to individual preferences, and creating effective communication tools to facilitate interaction between users. In addition, the structure of the metaverse needs to be designed in a way that encourages future growth and expansion, enabling the integration of new technologies and continuous updating of content(Lin et al., 2023). This may require the adoption of open standards and interoperable protocols that allow easy integration of new elements and interconnection with other metaverses or virtual platforms. 2. Related works The increasingly current trend of integrating new technologies into museum and exhibition venues has been further amplified especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, when, with the possibility of visiting virtual spaces, accessible for anyone and from anywhere in the world, the benefits of new technologies have become tangible and even more evident. Major national and international museums, with the aim of spreading their cultural heritage, have relied on these new technologies by creating virtual tours, allowing people to be able to visit the museum directly from their device(Wu et al., 2023). The Metaverse, in particular, has proven to be one of the most innovative and versatile tools that museums have adopted to increase user engagement and improve the visitor experience by making information more accessible and usable, offering new ways to explore content. Virtual spaces created in the metaverse are reproductions of real spaces, featuring all the details, complemented by multimedia elements such as sound effects or music, and visualized in the virtual world through special devices such as viewers, augmented reality glasses, etc. In addition to VR and AR, the Metaverse, uses other advanced technologies such as 5G, AI, DT, and IoT in order to enable people to have realistic experiences online. Despite its enormous potential, the concept of the Metaverse is still relatively new and under development, which is why there are few platforms actually developed and used at present, and only a few are gaining popularity and attention in recent years (Kang et al., 2022). Among them, for example, Second Life is one of the earliest and most well-known virtual worlds, offering an environment in which users can create avatars, explore virtual environments, and interact with other users; Roblox is an online game platform that allows users to create and share their own games and interact with other users through avatars; and Decentraland is a decentralized blockchain-based Metaverse platform that allows users to create, explore, and interact in a 3D virtual world in which they can also own virtual land and earn cryptocurrencies(Cheng et al., 2022). Some critics say that the Metaverse is a vague concept defined as the place of prosperity created by technology giants or, for example, a fantasy world so that we can control our lives. Many others, however, believe that the Metaverse concept represents an evolution of something that is already in progress. The Metaverse Roadmap team in 2007 identified four main scenarios of the metaverse world: augmented reality, lifelogging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds. In less than fifteen years, large companies have had the opportunity to mix these scenarios in order to create a world beyond the real also called Web 3.0 (Kim, 2021). Although many consider the Metaverse to be the next Web, there is still no clear consensus on how the Metaverse should be defined. In fact, some define it as a digital world beyond the analog world in which we live or others define it as a reincarnated version of "OASIS" in the movie “ Ready Player One ”, as a huge virtual world in which millions of people, or avatars, interact with each other. So, the Metaverse, no matter how it is defined, will be a fundamental part of the future within which part of our lives will take place (Schumacher, 2022). As such, this will have to be designed by architects rather than graphic designers, and the construction of spaces will have to follow social development criteria, such as the creation of shared spaces, respect for nature and the