Layerwise Interoperability in Metaverse: Key to Next-Generation Electronic Commerce.

Metaverse creates a fully immersive, self-sustaining, and hyper spatiotemporal virtual world where people from the physical world interact virtually irrespective of distances, communication protocols, regulations, and policies. The digital version of the real world should facilitate seamless communication, borderless transactions, and scalable infrastructure, encouraging participation and inclusivity. However, interoperability has become a significant issue that restricts the growth of the metaverse in reality due to independent standards, lone platforms, and unresolved communications challenges across the metaverse. This work discusses the necessity of metaverse interoperability from a socio-economic angle, emphasizing the need for connecting metaverses for distributed exchange, business interoperability, universal mobility, multi-application integration, and platform-agnostic experiences. We identified the components of interoperability that facilitate cross-metaverse communication to enable unbounded transactions and inter-metaverse user experiences. In addition, we proposed a four-layer architecture to achieve our goal of interoperable metaverse communication. Furthermore, we discuss how blockchain technology aids the expansion of interoperable metaverse through cross-platform transactions. Finally, we discussed key interoperability issues including dissimilar data standardization, different governance model, dissimilar consensus mechanisms, incompatible APIs, and heterogeneous technologies which make inter-metaverse communications challenging.