Congratulations to Associate Professor Wang Zhiwei on the award of MOE T1 Thematic Call 2022 Award

Project Write-up:

The Metaverse is a concept that refers to a virtual world that exists in parallel to the physical world. it represents an integration of the physical and digital worlds, capable of offering the Internet user a novel experience of reality. Offering a shared environment and economy for all people, regardless of their location, the metaverse is believed to reshape the society in many aspects including business, communication, travel and so on. However, before Metaverse can be brought into reality and fruition, some issues remain unclear on the prospective application of the metaverse.

One major such issue is that how to evaluate the social welfare that Metaverse is able to introduce to the society. Most of the existing research works on Metaverse application target on investment and marketing. This only helps in incentivising private enterprise in participating in the practical development of this new technology. Nevertheless, from a different perspective, it is imperative to answer the prescriptive question, that is, how Metaverse, if brought into reality, would be used for public good or induce positive social welfare to the entire society rather than only to the individuals. Noting the fact that the Metaverse acts as a real-time digital reflection of the physical world, this project would leverage this new concept to better understand how people are utilising the public infrastructure and predict their future behaviours.

By collecting real-time data and gaining insights into how people move and behave, we can make data-driven decisions on how to prepare new infrastructure or alter existing infrastructure to account for behavioural change or evolution. More specifically, this project would focus on future mobility system with electric and autonomous vehicles. Envisioning that the emerging technologies of electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs) would be widely applied in future mobility system, this study aims to build up an analysis framework investigating how to harness the data in Metaverse to better understand the travel behaviours in the future mobility system, so that the optimal planning of the transport infrastructure can be determined and a cost-friendly, green and expedient future mobility can be achieved.