Document Type

Journal Article

Journal Article Version

Final Version / Publisher's PDF (peer-reviewed)

Publication Date

12-1-2024

Abstract

Digital twins and digital artifacts have become integral components of metaverse platforms, providing users with a rich, immersive, and interactive digital experience through the deployment of diverse digital twins and digital artifacts such as 3D avatars, images, and objects. To date, a significant challenge persists in the lack of practical mechanisms to enable seamless teleportation and cross-metaverse interoperability for these digital twins and digital artifacts. There is also a lack of trusted monetization methods that facilitate trading and leasing of digital twins and digital artifacts. To address these important challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain and Non-Fungible Token (NFT)-based solution that facilitates the integration and teleportation of these digital twins and digital artifacts by providing trusted metadata, verifying ownership, and ensuring the authenticity of digital creations in the virtual world. Key to our solution is the introduction of a bridging mechanism that enables cross-metaverse interoperability, allowing for the portable transfer of NFTs across decentralized metaverse platforms. In addition, our solution focuses on empowering original digital creators by enabling the monetization of their creations through the ownership management capabilities offered by NFTs. To reliably and securely store the metadata and content of tokenized digital twins and digital artifacts, we integrate into our solution the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage system. To demonstrate the feasibility of our solution, we have developed and deployed all necessary smart contracts that govern the main functionalities and interactions of the proposed system on the Ethereum Goerli Testnet. We present our proposed system architecture, accompanied by informative sequence diagrams, algorithms, and testing details. We discuss how our proposed solution attains the main objectives outlined in the paper. We evaluate our proposed solution in terms of cost and security. We have made the complete source code of our smart contracts publicly available on GitHub.

Published in

Computer Communications

Keywords

Blockchain, Blockchains, Digital twin, Digital twins, Interoperability, Metaverse, Non-fungible tokens, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Security & privacy, Shared virtual environments, Source code, Teleportation, Traceability, Virtual reality

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