Characterizing Desired Metaverse Experiences: A Comparative Analysis of Korean and American Users
Abstract
Background The growth of metaverse industries has led to an influx of content in the digital world, but not all of it has been positively received by users. The current metaverse technology creates a contrast between the experience and the user’s imagination. Moreover, to create metaverse content that is suitable for different regions and cultures, it is important to understand the interests and desired activities of users. Hence, we sought to identify the characteristics of the experiences desired by users on metaverse platforms.
Methods To do so, we conducted a time series analysis of user interest and employed web-based data crawling and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to examine activities of interest to Korean and American users. Positive experiences were identified using emotional keywords, and experts compared these experiences in terms of reality, continuity, and social interactivity.
Results The results showed that Korean users were more interested in education- and travel-related content, whereas Americans preferred content related to creative activities, concerts, and live shows. Both groups shared a high interest in economic activities, such as banking and trading NFTs. Regarding reality, Korean users preferred realistic experiences in work and economic activities, whereas Americans favored unique, metaverse-specific experiences across all categories. With regard to continuity, Koreans liked short-term experiences, such as events and forums, except in leisure, while Americans preferred continuous experiences in education and work. In terms of social interactivity, Koreans favored individual experiences in economic and leisure activities for convenience, while Americans desired interactive experiences in the work category.
Conclusions It is expected that the results of this study will serve as fundamental data to analyze the characteristics of the experiences in which metaverse users are interested. Furthermore, they will help to examine the correlation between metaverse experiences. The proposed research agenda can lead to insights into the current metaverse market status and future direction of application in various industries.
Keywords:
Computational Platform, Metaverse Experience, Text mining, Data-driven Comparative Analysis1. Introduction
The reorganization of the industrial ecosystem that provides new experiences by linking with metaverse platforms has increased the scope of the metaverse’s market value along with industrial growth (Hollensen & Opresnik, 2023). In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the use of virtual media throughout existing industries and contributed to IT companies’ shift to the metaverse. For members of Gen Z (born between 1996 and 2012), who are familiar with digital media and pursue dynamic and fast-moving trends, the metaverse has become a very suitable medium to experience new activities within the virtual world and its reality.
In particular, the metaverse platform has become an influential environment that allows users to participate in new social and cultural experiences in various countries around the world without time and space constraints (Wang et al., 2022). However, there has been a gap between metaverse content, actual users’ desires, and the positive experiences that these users have enjoyed (Lee & Gu, 2022). One study points out that the current metaverse technology is mainly implemented through virtual reality (VR) equipment, which gives the user a fragile sense of presence and creates a huge contrast between the experience and the user’s imagination (Zhang et al., 2022). Moreover, due to regional and cultural differences, each user’s preferred or desired experiences may vary from country to country and society to society. To create metaverse content that is suitable for different regions and cultures, it is important to understand users’ interests and desired activities.
This study aims to examine the characteristics of user experiences (UX) within existing metaverse platforms over the past 5 years. In this context, “experience” refers to the personal insights, abilities, and emotions that a person gains through interactions with the world, while “activity” refers to the actions and pursuits in which a person engages. We defined the activities that interest users, the positive experiences they have had, and the aspects they value, comparing UX in the United States with those in South Korea, two countries that are contributing to the development of metaverse technology and have a large number of users. We adopted a mixed methodology approach including both qualitative and quantitative analyses by addressing the following research questions:
- RQ1) What has been the level of interest in metaverse platforms over the past 5 years?
- RQ2) What metaverse activities have users been mainly interested in during this period?
- RQ3) What are the top 12 most frequently reported positive experiences that users have had while using metaverse platforms?
- RQ4) In terms of reality, continuity, and social interactivity, what features characterize users’ experiences?
To answer the first question, we collected quarterly data from the web over the last 5 years and analyzed it using time series analysis. For the second question, we utilized web-based data crawling and measured term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to derive activities that mainly interested users in the two countries. To address the third question, we identified instances of positive UX from the IP address-based dataset by filtering emotional keywords. In this case, we mentioned users who live in each region post experience-related reviews online as ‘Korean user’ and ‘American user’. Finally, for the last question, we conducted a qualitative comparison of features between the two countries, using the Delphi technique, focusing on reality, continuity, and social interactivity. The main contributions of this study are summarized as follows:
- 1. We investigate similarities and differences in the level of interest in the metaverse and metaverse platforms in South Korea and the US through a trend survey.
- 2. We derive keywords related to metaverse activities that mainly interest of users in two groups and categorize the activity types.
- 3. We reveal the rankings of users’ positive experiences to obtain the metaverse industry insight in the preferences of their potential users.
- 4. By comparing the users’ positive experiences of the two countries, we provide insightful data for those designing user-centered metaverse content.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explores different points of view on metaverse experiences through related studies, and Section 3 describes the data collection method and data analysis processes for our comparative study. Section 4 analyzes the research results according to RQ1, 2, 3, and 4. Finally, Section 5 discusses the significance, implications, and limitations of the study.
2. Literature review
Experience is a concept that is widely used in various fields, including education, design, sociology, and management. It stems from certain types of consciousness, like perception and sensation, which give individuals awareness of their presence (Borchert, 2006). In this section, we review the various aspects of the metaverse experience and their classifications suggested in previous research. We also examine existing data-driven studies on the topic.
2. 1. Aspects of metaverse experiences
The metaverse is a medium that delivers immersive digital experiences. The experiences in the metaverse are differentiated from typical augmented reality (AR) and VR applications in that they prioritize sustainable content and social meaning. In that sense, some researchers have proposed social interaction as a crucial aspect of metaverse experiences. The metaverse enables users to socialize through sharing activities, photos, and news links all within virtual environments. It is particularly capable of providing an immersive experience through the exchange of emotions and social interaction in the form of a story, going beyond simply interacting in virtual space (Park & Kim, 2022). Dwivedi et al. (2022) emphasized that collaboration and communication are important attributes of metaverse experiences. On the other hand, Seidel et al. (2022) focused on the integration of the real- and hyper-worlds as a significant aspect of the metaverse experience, where the boundary between the real and unreal worlds is blurred in immersive, interconnected networks. Additionally, they pointed out that these experiences can be composable, meaning they can be potentially tied together in a coherent manner, such as a well-choreographed travel experience or a simulated “how-to” video overlayed on a physical appliance (Seidel et al., 2022). From a reality standpoint, metaverse experiences can be realistic or unrealistic. Even though these experiences are artificial and hyper-realistic, they are also as immersive and sensory-rich as real-life experiences.
The metaverse is also a medium that encourages user behavioral experiences that affect perception, cognition, and attitudes. Mystakidis (2022) has noted that interactive affordance occurs when users touch, grab, manipulate, and operate virtual objects in an “always-on” virtual world (Mystakidis, 2022). The technological affordance of immersion helps users shape the physicality of the metaverse, whereas the affective affordance leads them to influence the metaverse experiences through empathy and embodiment (Shin, 2022). Based on these fundamental theories, metaverse experiences have evolved within a broader view of affordances. From the perspective of ecological psychology, these experiences enable users to have multisensory and embodied interactions.
In addition, Ash Koosha (2002) emphasized that an optimal metaverse experience specifically requires “continuity”. Interoperable experiences in the metaverse support continuity across the different virtual platforms in which they exist. Users can interact with each other with the assurance of continuity of data related to identity, communications, and transactions with an individual sense of presence, and with a continuity of data (Matthew, 2022). The continuity of use is stressed to facilitate simulated experiences that are both playable and immersive. These experiences are not one-time occurrences but continuous and repeating events that can be carried out today, tomorrow, and the day after. Our review of previous research on metaverse experiences has led us to identify four key aspects, which are presented in Table 1 along with their characteristics.
2. 2. Classification of metaverse experiences
The range of experiences available on metaverse platforms is wide, and it is difficult to place metaverse experiences in one category. However, some scholars have attempted to classify these experiences into different types. Firstly, the metaverse serves to bring new experiences on top of, or in place of, our usual experiences (Paananen et al., 2022). When it comes to reality, the metaverse offers things we have never had before, experiences in the real world that we have not yet undergone, and possible future experiences.
Secondly, experiences in the metaverse are classified from the perspective of the activities.
Jon Radoff, the CEO of Beamable, a live game services platform, and a founder of the medium “Building the Metaverse,” described the immersive experiences of the metaverse mainstream as engagement in activities with others within specific places (Radoff, 2021).
The activities embedded in and linked with emergent content bridge and layer all the elements of the immersive experiences. The activities are not only user driven but also creator generated: both users and creators experience and create their activities. Even the non-technical user may add content and shape to his or her avatar (Radoff, 2021). We have listed below the representative types of activities based on the 14 categories mentioned by Radoff and elaborated on the specific examples of experiences as shown in Table 2.
Thirdly, users have diverse experiences while interacting with interfaces in metaverse solutions. These experiences can be categorized based on the variety and level of user engagement (Hillmann, 2021), which includes both mental and physical involvement (Dirin & Laine, 2018). Mental engagement involves full concentration on the platform and the use of short- and long-term memory, while physical engagement involves the use of various body parts to interact with the system. Olsson (2012) identifies six categories for the design and evaluation of XR solutions: UX instrumental, cognitive and epistemic, emotional, sensory, motivational, and social experiences [Table 3].
3. Methodology
3. 1. Data collection
We chose South Korea and the United States as our target countries for analysis because they are actively developing and conducting business in the metaverse. As a related work to examine regional differences, we referred a study analyzed data on virtual experiences and found a radical change between two countries (Sung, 2022). The researchers used a search engine to collect keywords related to “virtual tourism” through region filtering and then applied text-mining techniques. Hence, we decided to deal with representative metaverse platforms which allowed two country’s users to cross time and distance to cover potential issues with cultural differences between countries. In South Korea, companies such as Naver and SK Telecom have launched their metaverse services Zepeto and Ifland, and the number of users is rapidly growing. In the US, Meta, Epic Games, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others are competing in the metaverse market and have the largest number of users in the world (SM Strategic, 2022). To collect quantitative data, it was important to carefully design the data collection methods and the set of keywords to maintain validity.
To define the metaverse trend and interest in the metaverse platforms relevant to RQ1, we first used Google Trends to track and analyze changing patterns in search volume over time in a specific country (A1). Google Trends provides a time series index of the search volume in a specific geographic location based on a large number of user search logs (Choi & Varian, 2012). However, it only displays the search volume in one country at a time, with a relatively normalized 0-100 scale. We, therefore, also had to use Google’s Advanced Search to identify the actual number of times “metaverse” was searched according to region and language settings (A2). We also extracted and counted the cases where the term “metaverse” and a specific platform name appeared at the same time (A3).
Since we planned to derive answers to RQ2 and RQ3 by collecting all online documents related to the metaverse, we first amassed raw data. We conducted data crawling with the term “metaverse” using our Python script for the last 5 years (B1). It crawled documents, news, reports, blogs, and titles and descriptions on YouTube over the past 5 years. The team refined their search by repeatedly filtering and modifying keywords based on the term “metaverse.” We concluded that extra keywords must be filtered to carefully extract experiences such as insights, abilities, and emotions in the context of online documents.
- • Collection period: October 1, 2017 - September 30, 2022
- • Target regions: South Korea and the US
- • Channels: Web documents, news reports, blogs, YouTube titles and descriptions
- • Data crawling and analysis tool: Python 3.11
As a result, we obtained the metaverse-related mention volume and documents that revealed specific metaverse activities for 5 years from October 1, 2017, to September 30, 2022, for South Korea and the United States. We additionally filtered “activity” search terms (B2) to derive activity keywords that mainly interested users for RQ2. Then, we categorized the activity keywords semantically to organize activity types. For RQ3 and RQ4, we collected the C dataset by filtering the categorized activity keywords and positive emotion words while using the B1 dataset to obtain specific descriptions of metaverse experiences.
3. 2. Data analysis process
Based on the collected data, we conducted both a text-driven quantitative analysis of the collected data and a qualitative analysis. The procedure for addressing our research questions was as follows.
RQ1) Degree of interest in metaverse
First, utilizing Google Trends’ regional search, we found the search volume trend of the keyword “metaverse” and compared the two countries. Second, utilizing Google’s Advanced Search, the frequency of the keyword “metaverse” was found by quarter to investigate the trend of interest in the metaverse over time. Third, word frequencies of the following eight representative metaverse platforms were derived to analyze users’ levels of interest. We selected representative platforms that were launched simultaneously in South Korea and the United States at least two years ago as of October 2022 and had over a million monthly active users (MAU): Animal Crossing (42 million), Roblox (230 million), Fortnite (85 million), Second Life (1 million), Minecraft (165 million), Zepeto (2 million), Ifland (1.63 million), Gather Town (4 million) (Data Ai, 2023).
RQ2) Interesting activities in metaverse
After completing data cleaning and preprocessing, which removes stop words from a crawled raw dataset (B1), we filtered the data with the term “activity” to identify interesting metaverse activities that people frequently mentioned in the online environment. At this time, we utilized TF-IDF, which assigns a value to a term according to its importance in a document scaled by its importance across all documents in the corpus. Tang et al. (2022) investigated recent changes in experiences under the XR context through a comparative study, employing the TF-IDF. Marcinczuk et al. (2021) presented a paper in which TF-IDF outperformed word embeddings in similar cases, and it can adjust for the importance by increasing the value of a word in proportion to the number of times it appears in the document but offsetting it by the number of documents in the corpus that contain it (Beel et al., 2016). For these reasons, we determined that TF-IDF was suitable for our research.
Then, activity-irrelevant keywords such as prepositions and articles were removed, and the top 20 activity keywords were aligned. We compared and analyzed users’ areas of interest in the metaverse activities between the two countries. In addition, as preliminary work for RQ3, we grouped the activity keywords into four categories of activity types by clustering semantically related texts.
RQ3) Positive user experiences
By filtering specific documents from the derived data (B1), we attempted to extract positive UX. To do this, we had to start by selecting emotional keywords. Plutchik’s emotion model proposed 14 dimensions of emotional vectors (Plutchik, 1960), and based on this, Aoki and Uchida’s research presented a list of 288 detailed emotional words (Aoki & Uchida, 2011). We extracted only positive emotions from this vocabulary and clustered them into colloquial expressions popularly used in each country. In this way, we selected six positive emotion words in English and its equivalent in Korean. However, when we filtered the data (B1) using only these positive emotion words with activity-related words, we ended up with many documents that did not explain users’ experiences. In this case, many articles with future aspirational statements were included in the retrieval results. Our goal for RQ3 was to extract and analyze users’ past experiences. Therefore, we decided to additionally filter documents containing the word “review”. As a “review” is a judgment or discussion of something that includes individual opinions and user narratives in post-experience feedback, it was effective in excluding interpretations by third parties and future-oriented articles related to aspirations and plans that did not reflect users’ own experiences.
- • Positive emotion words: fun, impressed, amused, satisfied, surprised, excited
- • Example of keyword filtering: “metaverse,” “education,” “fun,” “review”
RQ4) Features of metaverse user experiences
We applied the Delphi technique to understand the characteristics of users’ positive experiences derived from the extracted data. The Delphi technique leads to reliable measurement in developing new concepts and setting future research directions (Vogel et al., 2019). Sinnappan and Tay (2023) recommends panels between 5 to 10 in the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) to gather the opinions of experts through three rounds of surveys to assess the level of agreement on specific issues. The Delphi process comprises a series of sequential questionnaires, interspersed by controlled feedback, which seeks to gain the most reliable consensus of an “expert panel” regarding the findings, particularly in relation to the credibility of the results (Hasson et al., 2000). Five experts in the field of UX and computer science participated in the Delphi panel. We included three Korean and two American members in the panel to ensure that opinions were not biased toward one side, considering cultural differences between countries. The information of the panel of experts is shown in Table 4.
An expert evaluation was conducted to assess the features of users’ positive experiences in the data (C). The evaluation used a scale based on three criteria commonly mentioned in the literature on UX in the metaverse. “Reality” in the metaverse context means an immersive, lifelike experience that allows users to suspend their disbelief and interact with a digital world as if it were real. “Continuity” in the metaverse refers to an experience that is not a one-time occurrence but a continuous and repeating event that can be done today, tomorrow, and the day after. “Social interactivity” means an interactive experience such as communication and social activity that occurs between multiple users. For the Delphi survey, the experts were asked to rate the protocol on a 5-point Likert scale on the criteria of reality, continuity, and social interactivity, as shown in Table 5.
The research team summed up the scores for those three criteria in each experience category (C) derived in Q3 and calculated average scores. In the second round of the survey, the research team shared the resultant average scores with the experts and encouraged them to freely share their opinions for and against through an online meeting. In the third round, the research team modified the resultant values reflecting the experts’ opinions, reshared the data to collect the experts’ opinions again, and finally put together the opinions. To indicate the data collection and analysis at each stage, we assigned symbols from A to C according to research questions in Figure 1.
4. Findings
4. 1. Interest in metaverse and its platforms
Figure 2 shows the levels of interest in the metaverse of Korean and American users investigated on Google Trends. According to the results, in the case of South Korea, the web search volume increased steadily from September 2020, reached its peak in November 2021, and gradually decreased thereafter. In the case of the United States, unlike South Korea, the web search volume increased only slightly until September 2021 and then soared very suddenly in October 2021, the approximate point at which South Korea showed a 100% increase. It was at this time that Facebook changed its name to Meta, which apparently influenced the web search volume.
The levels of interest in the metaverse of Korean and American users over the last 5 years were examined through the frequency with which the keyword “metaverse” appeared on the web. Looking at the quarterly trend in South Korea, the keyword appeared a total of 14,349,900 times. There was a low level of interest in the metaverse from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2021, even though Zepeto, the Korean metaverse platform, was launched and service provision began in March 2018 (Naver, 2022). The frequency of web appearances began to increase in the third quarter of 2021. This time point also came after “Digital New Deal 2.0,” a set of policies and initiatives, was announced by the South Korean government in 2021, aimed at accelerating the country’s digital transformation and building metaverse open sources (Ministry of Economy and Finance, 2021). At the time, Zepeto hit 300 million registered global users and recorded 2 million creators (Naver, 2022).
In case of the United States, the keyword “metaverse” appeared a total of about 51,583,900 times, which is about 3.5 times more than in South Korea. When we compared the populations of the two countries, as of 2021, the population of the United States was approximately 331 million and that of South Korea was approximately 51 million (The World Bank, 2023). Although the population of the United States was about 6.5 times larger than that of South Korea, the difference in word frequency was about 3.5 times during the same period, indicating that user interest in South Korea was higher than that in the United States.
As for the quarterly trends, from the fourth quarter of 2017, the initial time point of the trend investigation, the frequency of 86,400 was already shown in the United States, indicating a level of interest at least 3 times that of South Korea. Thereafter, the frequency gradually increased, showed remarkable increases in the second quarter of 2018 and the second to the third quarter of 2019, and showed some decreasing trends thereafter. As with South Korea, the frequency increased rapidly from the third quarter of 2020, and the continuous rising trend began from the time at which Nvidia launched Omniverse Cloud. Moreover, it was maintained until the first quarter of 2021 when the metaverse platform “Roblox” was listed and the third quarter of 2021 when Facebook changed its brand name to “Meta.” In the second quarter of 2022, when South Korea reached its peak, the United States reached its peak with a frequency of 8,590,000, about 3 times that of South Korea.
To concretely examine the levels of interest in the representative metaverse platforms for the last 5 years and analyze the differences between the two countries, the combined keyword metaverse and platform names (e.g., “metaverse” and “Roblox”) were set for quarterly advanced searches to determine the word frequencies on the web.
In case of South Korea, the levels of interest in Zepeto and Roblox as well as Animal Crossing soared from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2022. In addition, the levels of interest in Ifland and Gather Town, which were newly launched in the first quarter of 2021, showed steady rising trends from the second quarter of 2021. These two platforms both have an online collaboration tool that allows for real-time video transmission with a camera and easy customization to build virtual lands. In addition, in South Korea, the number of mentions of Fortnite and Second Life tended to be very low.
In the case of the United States, the level of interest in Minecraft was overwhelmingly high, followed by Second Life, Roblox, and Fortnite in that order. Second Life, which was released in 2003 and is called the origin of the virtual world, was continuously mentioned with the keyword “metaverse.” On the other hand, the platforms Zepeto, Ifland, and Animal Crossing developed in Asia received low interest in the US. Overall, compared to Korea, in the US, there was about 3 times as much data mentioning the specific platform names, and the types of platforms in which users were interested were completely different.
4. 2. Level of interest in metaverse activities
This section presents the results of the analysis of the differences between South Korea and the United States in terms of the types of metaverse activities that received high levels of interest. The documents related to the metaverse were collected with crawling using “metaverse” (B1). We filtered the data with the term “activity” and analyzed it using the TF-IDF method. The resulting value revealed the relative frequency of a word in a specific document compared to the inverse proportion of that word over the entire document corpus.
The derived data (B2) of the two groups were given weights through a TF-IDF analysis to evaluate the relative importance of activity terms and then compare and analyze the data from the two countries. In addition, we removed stop words, such as postpositions and adverbs that were not relevant to the metaverse experience terms, from all the data obtained through TF-IDF and adopted words suitable for explaining the types of metaverse activities. The top 20 words with the highest weights are shown in Table 6.
According to the results of the study, in South Korea, “travel” was the most important followed by “game,” “education,” and “work.” In addition, keywords related to “finance” and “bank” showed relatively high values, and those related to leisure activities such as “hotel,” “health,” “exhibition,” and “entertainment” also showed remarkably high scores.
In the case of the US, “work” ranked first, indicating a high level of interest in the metaverse as a tool to be utilized in work and team collaboration. In addition, as with South Korea, most of the scores for keywords related to economic activities, such as “blockchain,” “NFT,” and “bank,” were high. On the other hand, unlike in South Korea, the levels of interest in keywords related to creative activities, such as “art,” “architecture,” and “custom,” were high, and keywords for recreational activities, such as “entertainment” and “show,” also stood out. In both countries, the words “bank,” “work,” “economy,” “entertainment,” “design,” and “blockchain” appeared. In addition, words with similar and connected meanings, such as “education and learning,” “company and office,” and “event and show,” were shown in the two countries.
Figure 5 shows the process of placing semantically close words to group and categorize them. The metaverse activities of interest in both countries were grouped into the following four categories: “education,” “work,” “leisure,” and “economic.” We have established the representative category of “education” as a term encompassing learning, study, and creative activities. We have chosen the term “work” to represent activities related to professional tasks, job-seeking, and occupations. The category “economic” is associated with finance, consumption, investment, and business. For play, travel, and cultural activities, we have set the category as “leisure”. These categorizations have been integrated into the study to provide a comprehensive framework.
4. 3. Positive user experiences in metaverse
Based on the metaverse-related basic data (B1) that we crawled earlier, we filtered an additional six positive emotion words to understand the positive cases of UX in the metaverse. The top 12 experiences were derived for each of the four kinds of metaverse activity (education, work, leisure, economic) commonly included in South Korea and the US mentioned above (C). To identify the features of UX, the refined data from South Korea and the United States were compared in terms of reality, continuity, and social interactivity by category. In addition, to compare the characteristics of UX in detail, we also investigated which platform the experience mainly occurred on and the country in which the platform was developed.
Regarding the “education” category, Korean users mainly engaged in online learning to complete distance education during the COVID-19 period on the platforms Zepeto, Ifland, and Gather Town, focusing on secondary and higher public education. Users enjoyed participating in events such as matriculation ceremonies, graduation ceremonies, large-scale lectures, and festivals where many people gathered. We also found that most of the experiences involved visiting places that are geographically difficult to access, such as experiential learning, field study, exhibition, and historical sites, using the Minecraft platform, showing that on-site classes were replaced by virtual on-site learning within the metaverse. In the case of the US, artistic and creative educational experiences were dominant, and as for platforms, new ones such as The Fabricant, Universal, and Spatial, which specialized in educational functions, were mainly used. Teachers positively rated the potential for using metaverse content as educational materials in various areas, including explanations of invisible things and phenomena. Students particularly welcomed the opportunity to receive high-level engineering and safety education. Moreover, the users responded positively because participants could communicate immediately with experts. Table 9 presents the results of a comparative study of positive UX in the education category.
Regarding the “work” category in the metaverse, in the case of South Korea, service operators tended to implement the entire company space using large platforms such as Zepeto and Ifland and mainly held special events such as new employee orientation/training and forums. In addition, employees of startups and small businesses used virtual work-oriented platforms to overcome the limitations of small offices. Specialized functions such as document search and sharing for ease of use brought positive responses from office workers at corporations and public institutions. In the United States, users preferred functions that enabled them to have unusual work experiences in the office, such as spending time at travel destinations. The users showed interest in creative work activities, such as customizing their workspace or creating ideas on the spot and sharing them on social media. Table 10 presents the positive work experiences of the two countries’ users in the work category.
As for the “economic” category, in South Korea, financial companies preferred to use platforms such as Roblox and Zepeto to arrange one-off point-giving events or provide bank consultation-oriented services. Dokdo-verse and Shinamon are examples of such platforms specialized in finance. Korean users preferred banking experiences in a virtual space that could replace banking in the real world. They took advantage of virtual banking services, such as payments, transactions, and loans, by linking them with real-world assets. In the US, new platforms specialized in finance and financial management functions were extensively utilized. Among them, Decentraland enabled users to open blockchain-based virtual accounts so that they felt interested in participating in NFT auctions or purchasing virtual spaces using the currency of the virtual wallet. American users were more interested in economic experiences that included the concept of gamification. When users performed game quests in a specific space, they could receive cryptocurrency. They received compensation for collecting game characters and storing gift coupons. Table 11 presents the comparative results of positive UX in the economic category.
As for the “leisure” category, most of the users in South Korea utilized the platform Zepeto to enjoy traveling in unusual spaces. For example, some appreciated camping, fishing, and living on an island, transcending time and space constraints. The users positively perceived experiences in which they could move the avatar in a virtual space to perform physical activities, such as hiking, rock climbing, and swimming. In the US, game production-based platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox were mainly used for participating in leisure experiences. The users were fascinated by experiences that allowed them to create a surreal virtual world with certain themes, such as the Marvel and Batman worlds, in some spaces within the metaverse map and participate in it. They showed positive responses to unrealistic experiences of dancing with strangers and communicating with celebrities at large concerts. In addition, leisure experiences, such as playing intense sports (e.g., soccer, baseball, racing), performing yoga, and meditating with community members, mainly appeared. Table 12 presents the comparative results of positive UX in the leisure category.
4. 4. Features of user experiences in metaverse
This study compared and analyzed the characteristics of the experiences of Korean and American users to understand their interests and the attributes of their experiences. We discussed characterized points of UX in terms of reality, continuity, and social interactivity.
Figure 6 shows differences in the characteristics of UX in the education category. From the “reality” perspective, the expert evaluation of the characteristics of experiences showed that both countries provided realistic educational experiences as well as unusual ones that could not be offered in real-world classes at similar rates. In terms of “continuity,” Korean students mainly had one-off and event-like experiences, such as events at educational institutions and job fairs. On the other hand, in the case of the US, it was discovered that experiences that teachers could use as educational tools on an ongoing basis and those in which students could engage in learning for extended periods were offered. As for the “social interactivity” aspect, both countries provided similar levels of personal and interactive experiences.
Figure 7 depicts the differences in the characteristics of work experiences between the two countries. In terms of “reality,” it was found that in the South Korean case, highly realistic experiences that can be utilized immediately in reality and are useful in relation to work achieved a high score of 4.5 points. Regarding the “continuity” aspect, non-face-to-face services such as Zoom and conference calls were mainly used, and metaverse platforms were used only occasionally. On the other hand, in the case of the US, metaverse platforms were continuously used in daily life as a substitute for the non-face-to-face solution platform. The research showed a high score of 3.8 points. In the aspect of “social interactivity,” American users showed a very high score at 4.4 points since the metaverse facilitated artistic/creative work and SNS activities.
Figure 8 shows differences in the characteristics of UX in the economic category. The comparison of “reality” in the two countries revealed that South Korea focused on more realistic financial transaction activities than the US in the metaverse. American users desired to make virtual assets and buy and sell special items with idealistic content in the virtual world. In terms of “continuity,” American users tended to prefer activities that enabled sustainable banking operations more than South Koreans. As for “social interactivity,” we found that both countries mainly conducted personal economic activities and financial management regarding information and security rather than social activities.
Figure 9 shows differences in the characteristics of UX in the leisure category. In both countries, users’ leisure experiences showed neutral rates, with realistic and unrealistic experiences appearing simultaneously in the “reality” aspect. As for “continuity,” the users tended to continuously pursue new event-like experiences. The users preferred leisure experiences for self-management in daily life, such as yoga and swimming. At the same time, they desired one-off event-type experiences, such as visiting an amusement park, and attending a live concert, in search of more thrilling experiences. In terms of “social interactivity,” the users in the US showed higher rates of sports and leisure activities conducted in teams, while in Korea, solo leisure activities tended to be more prevalent.
In addition, we synthesized the results of the four categories and compared the characteristics of positive UX of Korean and American users according to the three evaluation scales, as shown in Figure 10. When considering the “reality” aspect, there were significant differences in the work and economic experiences between the users in South Korea and the United States. In South Korea, virtual experiences closely resembled real-life experiences, thereby minimizing the difference between the virtual and real worlds. In contrast, users in the United States preferred surreal virtual experiences that differed from reality and could only be experienced in the virtual world. Regarding “continuity,” Korean users leaned toward short-term experiences in the education, work, and economic categories. In South Korea, most virtual experiences were one-time events in which many people temporarily gathered, such as festivals and forums. This was particularly true of events in the education and economic categories, such as matriculation and graduation ceremonies. In contrast, users in the United States showed positive feelings toward virtual experiences that enabled them to participate consistently in daily life rather than experiences that ended in one session. Metaverse content producers and users in the education and work categories devised sustainable solutions that could serve as alternatives to non-face-to-face platforms like Zoom and WebEx.
Lastly, “social interactivity” varied by category. In South Korea, education, economic, and leisure experiences focused on individual learning and convenience rather than mutual exchange. Korean users experienced the most positive emotions when engaging in individual experiences. In contrast, users in the United States tended to be actively engaged in interactive experiences, exchanging, and sharing work and leisure experiences.
However, both countries had less social interaction and more personal experiences in the economic category compared to the other categories, perhaps because banking and e-commerce are mainly focused on individual transactions. It showed that the economic industry in the metaverse has evolved around activating the function of the platform centered on a personal business model rather than a collaborative working model.
5. Conclusion
As the metaverse platform industry continues to grow, it is expanding into a wider range of application areas, such as education and manufacturing. It is expected that users will spend more time in the metaverse and have more virtual experiences related to real-life economic and social activities.
This study began with the question of whether there are national differences in metaverse users’ positive experiences. Overall, we identified that users tend to prefer platforms developed in their own countries. This may be because these platforms were designed with content and features that reflect the society and culture of the users, resulting in a more optimized UX.
As implications of these results, first, the metaverse has the potential for infinite experiences by creating value co-creation led by different users. The experiences in the metaverse will constantly evolve to increase users’ satisfaction, considering different user characteristics. Hence, accessible research based on the analysis of specific user groups is required to attract users’ attention.
Second, through the results of this study, we found that the characteristics of users’ desired experiences in South Korea and the US were very different. Despite the fact that the metaverse is a platform that can connect the world without spatial and temporal barriers, it is necessary to design the experience content considering the social and cultural preferences and characteristics of the users in each country.
Third, it is meaningful that this study compared the characteristics of experiences in that we took a mixed methods approach, conducting both a qualitative analysis by experts and a data-driven quantitative analysis. Moreover, this study explored the characteristics of users’ experiences in Korean and American society over a substantial 5-year period, while previous studies collected data over relatively short periods.
On the other hand, as a limitation of the study, we identified the characteristics of experiences only through users’ opinions from online documents, such as blogs and web news reports. Consequently, our ability to acquire detailed impressions about personal feelings on genuine experiences was limited. Therefore, future studies should expand the research through in-depth user interviews or questionnaires. Considering the ethnographic and socio-cultural background status, specific evidence on the differences in positive experiences can be determined.
We tried to deliver empirical knowledge by comparing the countries and platforms based on the users’ opinions and experts’ judgments. It is expected that the results of this study will serve as fundamental data to analyze the characteristics of the experiences in which metaverse users are interested. Furthermore, they will help to examine the correlation between metaverse experiences. The proposed research agenda can lead to insights into the current metaverse market status and future direction of application in various industries.
Further academic analysis is necessary on how desired experiences can operate interactively within the virtual worlds and daily life from the perspective of scalability. Furthermore, additional research on how positive or negative metaverse experiences affect users’ behaviors and emotions needs to be conducted.
Notes
Copyright : This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted educational and non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.
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