The present document investigates specific use cases and service requirements for 5GS support of enhanced XR-based services, (as XR-based services are an essential part of "Metaverse" services considered in this study,) as well as potentially other functionality, to offer shared and interactive user experience of local content and services, accessed either by users in the proximity or remotely. In particular, the following areas are studied:

• Support of interactive XR media shared among multiple users in a single location, including:
  • performance (KPI) aspects; e.g. latency, throughput, connection density
  • efficiency and scalability aspects, for large numbers of users in a single location.
  • the combination of haptics type of XR media and other non-haptics types of XR media.
• Identification of users and other digital representations of entities interacting within the Metaverse service.
• Acquisition, use and exposure of local (physical and digital) information to enable Metaverse services, including:
  • acquiring local spatial/environmental information and user/UE(s) information (including viewing angle, position and direction);
  • exposing local acquired spatial, environmental and user/UE information to 3rd parties to enable Metaverse services.
• Other aspects, such as privacy, charging, public safety and security requirements.

The study also investigates gaps between the identified new potential requirements and the requirements already specified for the 5G system. It is acknowledged that there are activities related to the topic Metaverse outside of 3GPP, such as the W3C Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (OMI). These activities may be considered in the form of use cases and related contributions to this study, but there is no specific objective for this study to consider or align with external standardization activities. A difference between this study and TR 22.847 "Study on supporting tactile and multi-modality communication services" is that Metaverse services would involve coordination of input data from different devices/sensors from different users and coordination of output data to different devices at different destinations to support the same task or application.

The following documents contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of the present document.

• References are either specific (identified by date of publication, edition number, version number, etc.) or non-specific.
• For a specific reference, subsequent revisions do not apply.
• For a non-specific reference, the latest version applies. In the case of a reference to a 3GPP document (including a GSM document), a non-specific reference implicitly refers to the latest version of that document in the same Release as the present document.

Mobile metaverse services are discussed in this technical report both in the abstract and concrete. Specific services mentioned in the TR include:

• Situational awareness for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, to increase safety and efficiency of transport (see clause 5.2).
• XR enabled collaborative and concurrent engineering, to enable local and remote collaboration (see clause 5.3).
• Participatory in and passive observation of virtual reality events, e.g. basketball (see clause 5.6).
• Presentation of AR content, e.g. a feature length movie, on a virtual screen (see clause 5.7).
• Remote critical health care, including surgery and treatment (see clause 5.10).

The study also considers a number of use cases that feature new service enablers, including:

• Providing users with information and services that are of local relevance (see clause 5.1).
• Enhancements to IMS to support multiple users and multi-modal XR communication (see clause 5.3).
• Support for spatial anchors to link service information to specific locations (see clause 5.4).
• Support for spatial localization and mapping services, and enablers for them in the 5GS (see clause 5.5).
• Support for multi-service coordination for different input and output devices and diverse services (see clause 5.8).
• Support for synchronization of different data streams and predicted network conditions (especially latency) to enable immersive remote collaboration despite significant distance and therefore communication delay between participants (see clause 5.9).