Virtual Reality, Digital Twins and Metaverse

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid development of modern society, the demand for practicability and intelligence increases daily, and more application technologies are focusing on the development of digital intelligence. The development of smart manufacturing, smart industry, smart medical, and other fields is the only way to build a smart city in the future. Eventually, it will expand beyond the level of cities and countries to realize intelligent research on the entire universe, exploring its origin and development from a more intelligent perspective.

Virtual reality (VR) contains a variety of information technologies, among which simulation technology has developed in a more extensive direction in recent years. The demand for virtual reality technology in various industries and fields is increasing, and pursuit of a more extreme sense of immersion and interactivity is the mainstream of current research.

Digital twin (DT) provides a broader application space for virtual reality whilst simultaneously providing higher requirements for technological progression. In the future, various objects in the virtual world will have more abundant intelligence, allowing them to evolve independently and to map each other with objects in the real world. For existing applications and their future developments, the integration of real-world data into the virtual world is critical to the evolution of digital twin technology.

The exhibition of a variety of virtual achievements indicates that the development of the metaverse is no longer limited to the conceptual level, and digital twin provides a fundamentally effective method of improvement. The expansion of VR, DT, and the Metaverse promote each other, forming a closed-loop mutual push development method.

This Special Issue involves a wide range of multidisciplinary themes and realizes more systematic intelligent and digital development in multiple fields, such as industry, manufacturing, education, aerospace, medical and health, and urban development.

Prof. Dr. Zhigeng Pan
Dr. Zhihan Lv
Prof. Dr. Kai Xu
Guest Editors

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