Keynote Speaker: Metaverse from Fiction to Reality and the Research Behind It

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. For the Metaverse to become the reality we not only need better adoption of devices, and good networking tools. We also need to understand how people will be represented and interact with each other and the objects in the Metaverse. There is research to be done and existing research that is relevant. In this keynote we present a body of work on two main underserved areas: avatars and Haptics. Both areas of research are deeply connected to human perception and behaviour. We will also talk about the difficulties of creating the on the wild applications that will bring us the Metaverse.