Another Brick in the Wall: A Systematic Mapping Study Toward Defining Metaverse Engineering Through Socio-Technical Issues

Nowadays, virtual worlds are evolving into immersive metaverses, i.e., collective, shared virtual spaces that arise from the convergence of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), the internet, and additional digital technologies. These environments allow users to interact through avatars. While research has explored the technologies and social dynamics of the metaverse, two key limitations remain. First, there is no systematic overview of the expertise required to build metaverses and the key publication venues. Second, the socio-technical issues have not been fully synthesized or made instrumental for developing holistic design approaches that address both social and technical constraints. A deeper investigation is needed to guide future research, highlight challenges, and foster collaboration across disciplines. In this article, we propose a systematic mapping study that addresses the limitations identified. From an initial pool of 2,323 sources, we identify 63 primary resources to (1) characterize the research community around the metaverse and (2) elicit, synthesize, and categorize 19 social and 18 technical issues affecting the development of an effective metaverse. Based on our results, we contextualize the catalog of issues with respect to the current body of knowledge, providing insights and a research roadmap that transforms issues into actionable challenges in the scope of a novel, unified research asset coined “metaverse engineering”, i.e., the multidisciplinary discipline to identify processes and instruments to design socio-technical metaverses.