MetaTwin: Synchronizing Physical and Virtual Spaces for Seamless World Henry Kim henry.kim@utdallas.edu The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas, USA Ayush Bhardwaj ayush.bhardwaj@utdallas.edu The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas, USA Brandon Cofey brandon.cofey@utdallas.edu The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas, USA Dongbeom Ko dbko112@etri.re.kr AI Research Laboratory, ETRI Daejeon, South Korea Sungjoo Kang sjkang@etri.re.kr AI Research Laboratory, ETRI Daejeon, South Korea Jin Ryong Kim jin.kim@utdallas.edu The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas, USA Figure 1: MetaTwin scenarios. (a) A classroom discussion (concept fgure), (b) workplace collaboration (current implementation), and (c) social interaction in the workplace (current implementation). ABSTRACT This paper presents MetaTwin, a collaborative Metaverse platform that supports one-to-one spatiotemporal synchrony between phys- ical and virtual spaces. The users can interact with other users and surrounding IoT devices without being tied to physical spaces. Resource sharing is implemented to allow users to share media, including presentation slides and music. We deploy MetaTwin in two diferent network environments (i.e., within the US, Korea-US international) and summarize users’ feedback about the experience. KEYWORDS Virtual Reality, Metaverse, IoT, Digital Twin, Collaborative Platform ACM Reference Format: Henry Kim, Ayush Bhardwaj, Brandon Cofey, Dongbeom Ko, Sungjoo Kang, and Jin Ryong Kim. 2022. MetaTwin: Synchronizing Physical and Virtual Spaces for Seamless World. In 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’22), November 29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3562939.3565647 1 INTRODUCTION The Metaverse is emerging, providing plenty of opportunities to revolutionize how we work, live, and play. The Metaverse is a Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). VRST ’22, November 29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9889-3/22/11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565647 large-scale digital connection platform to allow people around the globe to collaborate and socialize together. Several frameworks have been proposed. Duan et al. [1] proposed an architecture focused on infrastructure and interaction. Ryskeldiev et al. [4] proposed a decentralized P2P Metaverse built on blockchain technology. We propose a new design approach called MetaTwin. MetaTwin is a collaborative platform that adopts various aspects of digital twin technologies [2, 3], allowing users to meet, collaborate, and socialize, interacting with various IoT devices and sharing resources. The classroom could be more engaging and accessible, allowing on-site and remote students to be in a shared space (see a concept diagram in Figure 1(a)). Collaboration can be signifcantly improved by not only sharing resources but also manipulating equipment together without geographical constraints (Figure 1 (b) and (c)). We believe that MetaTwin will redefne how the world works to enable many possibilities and bring new opportunities. 2 ARCHITECTURE The design goal of MetaTwin is to deliver immersive user experi- ences in a collaborative space where on-site and remote users can seamlessly interact with each other. Platform. The MetaTwin platform is designed to support spa- tiotemporal synchrony between physical and virtual spaces, allow- ing interaction with users and surrounding devices (see Figure 2). The platform is also designed to support interconnection between virtual worlds for large-scale users, spaces, and devices (under de- velopment). The Interaction Server handles real-time information about user movements, hand gestures, and voice interactions for essential communication among users. The platform also manages IoT devices using the Edge/IoT server.