The metaverse and digital, virtual environments have been part of recent history as places in which people can socialize, work and spend time playing games. However, the infancy of the development of these digital, virtual environments brings some challenges that are still not fully depicted. With this article, we seek to identify and map the currently available knowledge and scientific effort to discover what principles, guidelines, laws, policies, and practices are currently in place to allow for the design of digital, virtual environments, and the metaverse. Through a scoping review, we aimed to systematically survey the existing literature and discern gaps in knowledge within the domain of metaverse research from sociological, anthropological, cultural, and experiential perspectives. The objective of this review was twofold: (1) to examine the focus of the literature studying the metaverse from various angles and (2) to formulate a research agenda for the design and development of ethical digital, virtual environments. With this paper, we identified several works and articles detailing experiments and research on the design of digital, virtual environments and metaverses. We found an increased number of publications in the year 2022. This finding, together with the fact that only a few articles were focused on the domain of ethics, culture and society shows that there is still a vast amount of work to be done to create awareness, principles and policies that could help to design safe, secure and inclusive digital, virtual environments and metaverses.
翻译:元宇宙和数字虚拟环境作为人们社交、工作和玩游戏的场所已经成为了最近历史的一部分。然而,这些数字、虚拟环境的发展还处于初步阶段,带来了一些尚未完全揭示的挑战。本文旨在识别和映射目前可用的知识和科学努力,以了解目前有哪些原则、指南、法律、政策和实践是为设计数字、虚拟环境和元宇宙所准备的。通过范围性评论,我们旨在系统地调查现有文献,从社会学、人类学、文化和体验的角度区分元宇宙研究领域中的知识空白。本次评论的目标是双重的:(1)检查研究元宇宙的文献从不同角度的关注点,(2)制定设计和开发伦理数字、虚拟环境的研究议程。通过此论文,我们发现有几篇论文详细阐述了数字、虚拟环境和元宇宙的设计实验和研究。我们发现在2022年有较多的出版物,但仅有少数的文章关注伦理、文化和社会领域,这一发现表明,仍然有大量工作需要做来创建安全、可靠和包容的数字、虚拟环境和元宇宙的意识、原则和政策。