What Is Metaverse?—A Definition Based on Qualitative Meta-Synthesis

The term Metaverse has received much attention in various industries, society, and, increasingly, scientific communities. This creates demand for a comprehensive and broadly accepted definition of the subject, which is well grounded research. At same time, rather vision under evolution than an examinable phenomenon. Therefore, this study applied adapted version meta-synthesis method to analyze existing literature distill proposal definition. takes nature subject into account by weighing younger publications with many citations over older, less influential documents. Initially, 47 were fed process, 24 left after primary analysis. As result analysis, following proposed: “The interconnected web ubiquitous virtual worlds partly overlapping enhancing physical world. These enable users represented avatars connect interact each other, experience consume user-generated content immersive, scalable, synchronous persistent environment. An economic system provides incentives contributing Metaverse.” ensures systematic reproducible approach while at time preserving original voice notion analyzed order create new knowledge based on literature; thus proposed might serve as helpful foundation future